Copyright Fight Hits the Lab

“This week, the scientific publishing giant Elsevier... and Representatives Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, and Darrell Issa, a California Republican, withdrew their support for the Research Works Act after public outcry from public-access advocates... But the Research Works Act was always largely symbolic. ‘It’s a stake in the ground,’ said Allan Adler of the American Association of Publishers earlier this month, ‘designed to point out where the publishing industry stands.’ At issue is who, if anybody, should retain copyrights to—and make money off of—academic work that involves stakeholders as various as the government, universities, scientists, and publishing houses. The debate continues over whether, in the networked age, copyright will keep its place as an absolute, inviolable right... The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) policy on public access to scientific research is at the center of this debate... Like other scientists, cell biologist and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus handed over the copyrights to his scientific papers to journal publishers ‘without pause or complaint...’ during his tenure as director of the NIH, he was inspired by physicists and mathematicians at a Los Alamos lab who were sharing ‘preprints’ of their papers on the digital platform ArXiv. Varmus pushed for the NIH to start a robust open-access database of scientific papers... Facing resistance from scientists and publishers alike, he scaled back his ambitions, ending up in the summer of 1999 with a voluntary digital repository that guaranteed a one-year buffer between publication in a journal and posting online. Called PubMed Central, it was a landmark achievement... Jump ahead to 2007, when advocates for PubMed Central pushed through a provision in the 2008 appropriations bill that required any scientist funded by the NIH to submit copies of his or her final journal manuscripts to PubMed Central... Today, some 2.3 million scientific articles are stored on PubMed Central. NIH officials familiar with the site’s traffic statistics report that some half million people visit the site daily, downloading on average a million papers each day... ‘We obviously have no problem with the federal government doing what it can to increase public access to federally funded research,’ says Adler. ‘The only question is why they believe it's necessary and appropriate to take what publishers add to researchers' accounts.’ Because this isn’t just about research, Adler says. It’s about the creative product of that research. In the case of the NIH, the federal government is interfering with the relationship between researchers and the publishers that cultivate and promulgate their work. As part of that relationship, critics say, authors are opting to hand over copyright to the journal of their choosing—in part to compensate the work the journals do... In the United States, the federal government cannot retain copyright on works produced as a function of government. Furthermore, in its 1976 overhaul of copyright law, Congress contemplated whether government should hold copyright on works funded by government... At the time, legislators declined to resolve the issue and instead provided guidelines: ‘Where, under the particular circumstances, Congress or the agency involved finds that the need to have a work freely available outweighs the need of the private author to secure copyright,’ reads the relevant committee report, ‘the problem can be dealt with by specific legislation, agency regulations, or contractual restrictions.’ Under the Constitution, the purpose of copyright is to ‘promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.’ Does the current state of scientific publishing move science forward? ... Now, the real concern of people at the American Association of Publishers has shifted to the White House. As part of the reauthorization of the federal research-and-development America COMPETES Act in January of last year, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was charged with developing public-access policies at other government agencies that fund scientific research such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and others... The OSTP process is ongoing and will culminate in guidance given to a multi-agency administration task force on public access... With pressure to codify federal policy on academic copyrights, open-access advocates see a thrilling opportunity to use the U.S. governments tremendous leverage—the NIH alone funds some 325,000 researchers and spends $25 billion a year—to tip the scales in favor of a new, more open model for science publishing. Champions of open access say the inability to collaborate and access scientific research freely in the past was a technical limitation—not a principled policy... Then came the Internet, bringing along with it historic efficiencies in digital reproduction and distribution... Publishers push back, arguing that they do more than print—for example, they bring together scientists to do peer review, the backbone of the journal-publishing endeavor, and otherwise ensure