Public Access to Public Research: A Radical Idea Grows Respectable

"In Washington, DC, they broke out the bubbly February 22 at the Dupont Circle offices of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishers and Academic Resources Coalition. 'A magnum of prosecco in the office,' laughs SPARC executive director Heather Joseph. 'It was kind of fun.' The occasion for celebration was a directive issued that afternoon by the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) to all federal agencies that fund at least $100 million a year in research and development. The directive requires investigators funded by those agencies to make available for online public access within a year or so of publication all journal papers, including their data sets and supplementary material that were supported by taxpayer dollars. It was a milestone in a struggle over access to the scientific literature that began in the 1990s and in which ASCB played an important role. Until the OSTP order, the only federal agency that required public access posting was the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As mandated by a 2007 congressional appropriations bill, NIH has required all grantees since April 2008 to deposit for online access through PubMed Central (PMC) an electronic copy of the final version of any published peer-reviewed paper that draws on NIH-funded research. The new OSTP directive will extend a similar mandate to 19 additional federal agencies. Included for the first time are the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DoE), and the Department of Agriculture, all major players in biology research. Each must now come up with its own public access program. The OSTP directive is a significant victory for the 'open access' movement, says Joseph who champions the cause at SPARC and before that as Publications Manager for ASCB. “It’s been a long haul to get the concept of open access understood,” says Joseph, “and debunk the fears that grew up around it, which unfortunately many of the commercial publishers are happy to perpetuate. We had to get people to understand that you can have a healthy journal publishing market using an open access model, that subscription access can co-exist peacefully [with open access] but, given the choice, researchers tend to prefer to have as many of their colleagues as humanly possible get access to their work and for them to have access to the work of as many of their colleagues as humanly possible... Corks, however, were not popping all over the scientific publishing world in honor of OSTP. Many of the big commercial scientific publishers such as Macmillan (the Nature Group) had become more or less resigned to the new rules, especially after President Obama signed the 2010 renewal of the America COMPETES Act, which authorized the extension of public access to other federal agencies. The wide acceptance of public access to federally funded research was revealed in 2011 by a public relations disaster around a short-lived bill called the Research Works Act (RWA). Supposedly promoted by another commercial scientific publisher, the bill would have gutted the NIH open access program by defunding it. Instead, RWA provoked across-the-political-spectrum outrage from 'information wants to be free' Internet techies to Macmillan Publishing. The new OSTP rule was greeted more warmly, albeit without the high spirits and with a splash of anxiety by other nonprofit scholarly journal publishers such as the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, MD. 'Overall, I’m pleased with the balance and flexibility that’s indicated in the document,' says Executive Director and CEO Frederick Dylla. 'I’m a little nervous because you’re dealing with a bureaucracy and you’re often not dealing with the same set of folks, year after year.' The current federal fiscal standoff and the OSTP directive that any new public access program be funded through existing allocations also pose questions about long-term stability in Dylla’s mind.  Dylla, who has been working in advance of the expected OSTP rule with DoE and NSF on a tagging system to identify federal funding on paper submissions, believes that these sort of 'devil in the details' problems will make or break the wider federal public access policy. Many of the policy details of the OSTP directive are not widely appreciated, Dylla contends, especially since the news media have overplayed the open-the-gates aspects. 'Unfortunately the headlines focus on ‘the government is going to open up the pay wall.’ But if you actually read the (OSTP) memorandum, it’s much more nuanced.'  First, OSTP acknowledges the real value that publishers add to scientific publishing, he says. The savings from dropping printing on paper are minor compared with the continuing expenses of managing the peer review process, setting editorial standards, performing the multi-layered typesetting required in modern HTML manuscripts, and building a 24/7 online access platform and permanent