What ever happened to the DC Principles?
The Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science ( aka DC Principles) was launched in 2004 as a unified not-for-profit scientific publishing statement, right around the same time as the birth of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. The audience for this face-off was and continues to be scholarly societies with well-established reputations and publishing routines as sources of pride and revenue, versus the populist and academic library consumers
According to their most eloquent spokesperson, Executive Director of the American Physiological Society Dr. Martin Frank, “The signers of the DC Principles use business models that derive revenue from multiple sources in order to make their content as freely available as possible to their communities, to the public, as well as to scientists in under served countries.”
The Alliance declared their own principle, that taxpaying funders of federal NIH research were in effect paying twice the same research they paid for, most dramatically ( and for acquisitions librarians, traumatically) observed in the annually rising cost of electronic journal licenses.
One of the signatories to the DC Principles, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, undertook a survey published in 2005 entitled The Facts about Open Access: a study of the financial and non-financial effects of alternative business models for scholarly journals.
The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 gave DC Principles supporters a target for their own talking points, but public surveys showing 80% or more of the public supporting public access, combined with a very collaborative relationship between former NIH Director Zerhouni and President Bush, seemed to negate the business model and peer review arguments from the scholarly non-profit publishing sector. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) introduced their policy on “Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH Funded Research,” which started as a voluntary program and eventually became a mandatory requirement and policy with passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764.) in December of 2007. Subsequent introduced legislation the DC Principle coalition supported, such as the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, did not find enough support to advance beyond committee study. Then the slam dunk: the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 made the NIH Public Access Policy permanent.
The coalition of scholarly society non-profit publishers that continue to support the DC Principles could be excused with a case of major indigestion, or perhaps a collective ulcer. There is certainly still a market for the benefits of careful peer review and editing, but at what cost that a library or a consortium of libraries will pay? The rest of the scholarly research world is not standing in place, and green open access institutional repositories are growing. More sleepless nights for scholarly publishers. More about institutional repositories in the next post.
