The Medical library Association issued an Action Alert on January 12th, asking their membership to contact House Representatives and urge them to oppose H.R. 3699,  The Research Works Act. MLA suggested using the talking points developed by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:

• The bill would prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grant funding to require that all members of the public be guaranteed online access to the research findings that their tax dollars fund;
• The bill would reverse the NIH Public Access Policy and stifle critical advancements in life-saving research and scientific discovery;
• The NIH Public Access Policy currently provides millions of Americans with access to vital health care information from the NIH PubMed Central database;
  • Under this policy, more than 90,000 new biomedical manuscripts are deposited for public accessibility each year
• H.R. 3699 would prohibit the deposit of these manuscripts, seroiusly impeding the ability of researchers, physicians, healthcare professionals and patients from accessing and using this health-related information in a timely manner;
• H.R. 3699 would also affect scientific research coming from other federal agencies including information on energy, the environment, climate change, and other areas that impact the well being of th epublic
• Address how our library and community have benefited from the NIH Public Access Policy

The Special Libraries Association (SLA) used their public policy blog to make the same points as MLA and points to the taxpayer access draft letter to Oppose H.R. 3699.

The American Library Association (ALA) was out in front as early as January 9th, writing in the District Dispatch about  ALA’s  long-time, ardent support of increasing access to information of all types, including federally funded research.   This latest bill, the Research Works Act, would act in direct contradiction and therefore the ALA vehemently opposes the bill.

SPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition suggested on January 6th that “Supporters of public access to the results of publicly funded research need to speak out against this proposed legislation. Contact Congress to express your opposition today, or as soon as possible. “

Here is how you can speak up, courtesy of www.taxpayeraccess.org:

• Representative Issa 
  @DarrellIssa
  http://issa.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=597&Itemid=73
  Fax: (202) 225-3303
• Representative Maloney 
  @RepMaloney 
  https://maloney.house.gov/contact-me/email-me (Using zip code 10128-3679)
  Fax: (202) 225-4709
• Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee – especially if you’re a constituent.
  http://1.usa.gov/zDqnne 
• Your representative – through the ATA Action Center: http://www.congressweb.com/cweb2/index.cfm/siteid/sparc

Recently I was asked in a blog post comment whether taxpayer-sponsored research combined with paying an additional out-of-pocket open access fee to an OA publisher amounts to a double-burden on taxpayers.

Good question.  Here’s how I would reply. There is already funding support precedent for either:

• Using part of the original NIH grant for page charges or open access fee (part of the first taxpayer subsidy)
• Seeking an institutional subsidy for non-NIH open access author fees.

Perhaps a public university’s institutional subsidy could be seen as a second taxpayer burden;  For a university such as UC Berkeley, it really seems a deliberate decision to adopt the value of making the research immediately and perpetually open and accessible.

There is an alternative.  It already exists.  There is a top-ranked,  NIH-published scientific journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, that presents the government as an open access publisher in the immediate and open distribution of public health information.  As part of its mission, EHP seeks to disseminate critical environmental health information as broadly as possible.

In 2003, EHP became a peer-reviewed research and news open-access journal. All news and research articles published in EHP since 1972 are available free online. EHP is committed to promoting the discussion and exchange of information internationally and even publishes a Chinese language edition. EHP also is committed to its Science Education Program.

Sometimes the soft firewall I try to keep between this blog and daily life at a top-tier academic medical center library just breaks down.

One of my favorite scientist teachers down the hall turned to me when her favorite librarian wasn’t available.  She was preparing a lecture for this fall’s new class of medical students and had found the perfect New England Journal of Medicine article to support her future lecture on genomic medicine, particularly the images.  I explained what most librarians have known for about five years: The New England Journal of Medicine created a  download service for images restricted to individual subscribers–though readers at institutional subscription sites could still download images for teaching by opening  each image separately and saving  it. At the time it seemed typical of publishers that want and need to provide extra services and benefits to retain their individual subscriber base…along with a don’t ask, don’t tell back-door way for institutional medical educators to continue to love NEJM images for teaching.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, we new have the NEW NEJM.   Medical educators may be stomping on their Red Sox caps all over the world, because even with institutional access, downloading a set of images for an article will cost either $15 or a bit more if you pony up for a personal subscription. Chi-Ching$.

Well, no real surprise, as publishers struggle to find revenue in competition with the growing open access movement and changes in federal law requiring NIH-mandated public access for NIH-sponsored research.

As I sat with my scientist teacher friend to commiserate, we scrolled down to the bottom of the article in question. It was not really original research, but  rather an inspiring review article by some of the top scientists and administrators at NIH.  To the NEJM’s credit, the article was free and available.   But those gorgeous images I can’t show you would cost a medical educator an individual subscription or $15. Not to mention the AP Biology teachers at hundreds of high schools across the globe.  The credit for the article read:

Seems like the credit for these images in part or in whole belongs to us tax payers, based on the contributions of the National Human Genome Research Institute.  So I encouraged my faculty friend to write to Dr. Feero.

There is still the issue of the NEJM feeding federally sponsored images into their revenue  machine…the new NEJM. It’s not the money that is the big issue.  It is the teaching of future scientists and physicians.  Can’t the NEW NEJM distinguish public images?

On July 29th, Allan Adler, Vice President of government and legal affairs at the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee that FRPAA would seriously threaten the scholarly publishing industry:

“Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they’ve paid for. As taxpayers ourselves collectively and individually, everyone in this room has paid for government‐funded research, and the data and summary reports that result from this research. But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer‐reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.”

I suppose Mr. Adler is attempting to represent the traditional role of publishers that produce print and electronic journals with independent editorial oversight and marketing, most of which reach a public or private readership via a private or institutional subscription.

The problem with making such a one-size-fits-all statement is that it misses the point that both state universities and public libraries that subscribe to either print or electronic journals are using public taxation resources in their budget to provide shared public access to biomedical journal articles, via institutional journal subscriptions or aggregated article service providers.   Taxpayers are paying again.

Additionally, at nearly every non-public academic medical center, including my own employer,  where I regularly assist consumers looking for health information, costly subscription license agreements allow on-site journal access to visitors, providing public access to consumers seeking current information on health care research.

Public libraries and schools send their consumers or students to health sciences libraries for access to emerging health information.  A public librarian’s first thought is not whether their local medical center library is public or private.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of patient groups, physicians, researchers, educational institutions, publishers, and health promotion organizations,  has a growing list of institutional members, which also includes the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL).

Academic health sciences libraries understand the serials crisis and the issue of taxpayer access.  Individual researchers drop their personal subscriptions to journals and depend on shared library-subscribed access.  AAHSL provides relevant links to allow libraries to understand the issues of open access.  Taxpayers are paying once for NIH research…and many libraries are paying again.

From the ARL SPARC press release:

Washington, DC – The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives announced it will hold a hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research on Thursday, July 29. The hearing will provide an opportunity for the Committee to hear the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders on the potential impact of opening up access to the results of the United States’ more than $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.
The Subcommittee’s interest stems from the growing number of visible expressions of interest in the issue of public access that have surfaced in recent months, in both the Legislative and Executive branches of government. Notably, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year hosted a Public Access Policy Forum on mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information.
Additionally, H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which was introduced into the House on April 15 by Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) and is supported by a growing bi-partisan host of cosponsors, was referred to the Committee. The bill, and its identical Senate counterpart (introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)), proposes to require those eleven federal agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to implement policies that deliver timely, free, online public access to the published results of the research they fund.

========= END SPARC PRESS RELEASE==============

Want to see the arguments that the commercial sector will take? They are going to try to kill the House bill H.R. 5037 with this kind of argument:

• the government to become a competitor of independent publishers operating within the private sector in a well-established marketplace.
• Duplicates existing mechanisms that enable the public to access research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities published in scholarly journals.
• It would require the affected federal agencies to develop and maintain costly electronic repositories.
• Agencies will need to divert millions of dollars away from federal research grants and towards database costs.

The letter that the opposition published in the DCPrinciples web site, signed by:

Acoustical Society of America
American Academy of Pediatrics
American Association of Anatomists
American Association for Cancer Research
American Association for Clinical Chemistry
American Association for Dental Research
American Association of Immunologists
American Association of Physics Teachers
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American College of Clinical Pharmacology
American College of Radiology
American Dairy Science Association
American Dental Association
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Institute of Physics
American Medical Association
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
American Psychological Association
American Physiological Society
American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists
American Roentgen Ray Society
American Society of Animal Science
American Society of Agronomy
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
American Society for Investigative Pathology
American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
American Society of Plant Biologists
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
AVS–Science &Technology of Materials, Interfaces and Processing
Cambridge University Press
Crop Science Society of America
Elsevier
The Endocrine Society
Entomological Society of America
European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Genetics Society of America
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
International Association for Dental Research
International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB)
John Wiley and Sons
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
The McGraw-Hill Companies
Mycological Society of America
The Optical Society
Oxford University Press
The Physiological Society
Poultry Science Association

So it has come down to special interests promising to honor and protect the public interest, even as libraries continue to drop subscriptions from many of these publishers (some public libraries do not have a single journal from any of these publishers).  Does the current system work?   Will we be better off with more open access or with the status quo?

Time for you to contact congress or plan to be in DC on July 27th.

In a story line out of the post- Reagan excesses of substituting the private sector for governement activity, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), a highly respected research journal for a narrow, exclusive slice of taxpayers, is neither published nor sponsored by the National Cancer Institute(NCI).  It participates in Pubmed Central archiving only at the bare minimum of article availability 12 months after publication.  It earns significant income and profit for Oxford University Press.  It is one of many examples of business as usual where taxpayers subsidize the intellectual content and are told to expect that their investment appears in a clinic or hospital where the promise of cancer research becomes personal.

The history of how JNCI went from public to private property is outlined pretty well on the NCI website with a fact sheet to address the persistent questions that have dogged the privatization since 1996. Under the terms of a 1996 cooperative agreement with NCI, Oxford University Press over a five-year transition gradually took over responsibility for JNCI and became the sole private owner. 

Now here is the game changer, I think, if it happens. On May 17th, President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint Harold Varmus, M.D., to serve as Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

President Obama said some very gratious things about Dr. Varmus in nominating him: ““…brings unmatched expertise at all levels — not only in cutting edge scientific research, but also as a leader in the development of strategies for improving patient care, in scientific education and training, and in the design of novel public-private partnerships.” 

Another part of Dr. Varmus’ profile is probably creating some sleepless nights for OUP. He is the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of the Public Library of Science, the successful open access publisher; as well as chairs the Global Health Advisory Committee  at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Should not the fruits of cutting edge, federally funded cancer research be immediately and readily available to the public and other researchers? I wait to see if Dr. Varmus is successfully appointed and uses this leadership position to advocate for a more open JNCI.

“Eighty percent of American internet users, or some 113 million adults, have searched for information on at least one of seventeen health topics. Information professionals in a variety of settings are just as likely as librarians in hospital or medical centers to encounter requests for useful health information. Usefulness can be calculated as relevancy multiplied by accuracy, divided by the work necessary to obtain an answer. Despite the availability of accurate medical information, the work necessary to access and utilize such information often discourages both discovery and use.”

I lifted this quote from my own class description of the Medical Librarianship course I teach at San Jose State University.  The statistic comes from Pew Internet and Society. My conclusion is that access to massive amounts of information does not guarantee a satisfactory user experience.

On May 27th, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release calling on a broad coalition heath information providers, policymakers, activists, and individuals to address a crisis in health literacy.  Three key goals for the action plan include:

• Provide everyone with access to accurate and actionable health information
• Deliver person-centered health information and services
• Support lifelong learning and skills to promote good health

There is an open access issue built into the first focus point: “Provide everyone with access to accurate and actionable health information.”   Certainly a member of the public can now walk into almost any academic health center library and sit down at a public workstation that offers access to all their electronic journal and book subscriptions.  But what proportion of persons that really desire this level of access can actually overcome the hurdles of geography, transportation, and library hours, not to mention the literacy needed for searching, locating, and perhaps printing or downloading a copy for personal use?

As the balance of peer-reviewed literature shifts to electronic open access, we can eliminate many of the hurdles that involve traveling to a location or accessing relevant health information at a particular time. The public and congressional support for taxpayer access to funded research  is certainly supporting the shift in this direction. We can imagine that as consumers access larger quantities of published health information, the other needs outlined for health literacy improvement become essential for understanding and changing negative behaviors.

Please take a look at the documents on the action plan web page. 

Health literacy has universal relevance.

After reading this message, I asked Margo if I could post it, and she said go for it.

Dear Colleagues:

The day H.R. 5037 (Federal Research Public Access Act of 2010 – FRPAA) was introduced, I happened to be sending an open access article to a headache support group.  The article was the result of federally sponsored research into the link between weather and migraines.  (And yes, as all migraineurs know instinctively, there is a link!)  When I forwarded the article, I added an explanation of why this article was freely available to them.  Here’s what I told them:

I’d like to point out that the reason this article is free is that published results from any NIH (National Institutes of Health) sponsored study must be made available to the public, free of charge, no later than 12 months after publication.  This is called the NIH Public Access Policy (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/).  The biggest reason behind this is that the taxpayers have paid for the research, therefore we should be able to see the published results and not be charged. This has been the law of the land since April, 2008.

Today, a bi-partisan sponsored bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives: H.R. 5037 – the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2010 (FRPAA).  This bill would broaden public access policy to include published work sponsored by any federal agency who grants at least one million dollars for research – such as National Science Foundation, Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, etc.  This bill would mandate public access no later than 6 months after publication.  Again, the rationale is that we the taxpayers have paid for the study, we should be able to see the results – and not be charged.  The reason for the 6 month time frame is that science “gets old” after one year and in order for researchers to build on the research of others, they need to have access to it sooner.

We can expect a huge lobbying effort on behalf of the publishing industry.  I’m also expecting some objections from people who think that the federal government is too big or too strong.  Speaking from the perspective of medical and scientific research, however, I think that only good can come from the passage of FRPAA.  Most scientists work for non-profit institutions and have limited funds to pay for journal subscriptions.  Libraries in these institutions are even more strapped than the scientists.  The cost of medical journals has risen 400% in the last 20 years! (That is not a typo!)

If you want to read more about FRPAA, go to: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa/index.shtml.

The point is to take every opportunity you have to educate your users, colleagues and anyone else about this important legislation.  Please note the point I make near the bottom about objections from folks who think the federal government is overreaching.  We don’t want this bill to be drowned by rhetoric.  If you are delivering any open access document to any client, please add a little education to the delivery.

Best,

Margo

Margo Coletti
Director
IS/Knowledge Services
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
email: mcoletti@bidmc.harvard.edu

Spin is everything.

The result of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable of key stakeholders charged on October 29th, 2009, by the U.S. House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), was released on January 12th, 2010, after reaching enough consensus to suggest something was accomplished.

The Science Magazine Blog optimistically stated that “A diverse group of scientific publishers, librarians, and university officials has come together to endorse a once-controversial idea: that all federal research agencies should require that papers published by the investigators they support be made freely available to the public as soon as possible.”  This optimism was based on a consensus of 12 out of 14 representatives.   Certainly a majority.

Of course, the two dissenting representatives are probably the most well-known polarized opposites within academic scholarship.

Y.S. Chi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Global Academic and Customer Relations, Elsevier, issued a dissent that attempted to avoid confrontation and vaguely suggested a fundamental inability to agree with the proposal as a whole.  He also felt it necessary to state, “I express all of my views consistent with my willingness to participate in the Roundtable as a knowledgeable and concerned citizen and not as a representative of my employer.” Huh?  Too bad that no records were kept of the intense negotiations.

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science (PLoS), also chose the path of dissent, stating that the final report “stops far short of recognizing and endorsing the opportunities to unleash the full potential of online communication to transform access to and use of scholarly literature.”

Concurrent with the Roundtable’s deliberations, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was also running a participatory Public Access Forum.   Among the public comments received was a statement from Elsevier responding to the OSTP forum questions.  In this case, Vice Chairman Chi co-signed the contribution on Elsevier letterhead.  On record, speaking for Elsevier and not as a private citizen, the letter he co-authored with David Hansen stated, “There is no systematic quantitative evidence to show that access is an issue for researchers or the public. It is therefore unclear why the government would seek to implement any policy that pertains to the outputs of published research.”

Difference of opinion or chasm?

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) satisfies the central demand of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access: Ensuring taxpayers have access to the results of research funded with tax dollars.  President Obama’s Office for Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) is attempting to collect genuine taxpayer comments through Thursday, January 7, 2010, addressing the following questions:

• Compliance. What features does a public access policy need to ensure compliance? Should this vary across agencies?
• Evaluation. How should an agency determine whether a public access policy is successful? What measures could agencies use to gauge whether there is increased return on federal investment gained by expanded access?
• Roles. How might a public private partnership promote robust management of a public access policy? Are there examples already in use that may serve as models? What is the best role for the Federal government?

Click the image to participate:

Note:  There is a Guide to how to participate and comment on the policy forumblog posts.