NCBI Images is not a collection of purloined or open content, but a database, according to the original NIH press release, which said:

The Images database enables users to search images based on keywords and a variety of other parameters, such as author and publication date. Images and data can be easily saved to users’ collections and shared with others through the use of My NCBI, a feature that allows users of NCBI resources to customize their search and display preferences, save and share searches, build bibliographies, and perform a variety of other functions….
NCBI creates public databases in molecular biology, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing molecular and genomic data, and disseminates biomedical information, all for the better understanding of processes affecting human health and disease.

So what’s the beef with publishers?  On January 11th of this year, Ian Russell of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) issued a public opinion on the database:

On 28 October 2010, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched Images, a database of more than 2.5 million images and figures from medical and life sciences journals. However, whether NIH actually has the rights to use these images is highly questionable; lawyers for the Professional & Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP-PSP) believe that this image database represents a derivative work and as such may be infringing publishers’ copyrights… ALPSP joins the Association of American Publishers in urging publishers to familiarize yourself with the NIH image database and, if necessary, to take legal advice on whether Images may infringe your copyright.

One of the features that provoked publisher concern is the bold presentation of “highly cited” images on the opening page of the database.

At the individual image level, there is complete citation record for the original article, as well as copyright and disclaimer advice. NCBI’s motto for this database is “Providing another way to search PMC articles and other full-text resources at NCBI.”

In spite of all this reassuring evidence, the dynamic duo, DC Principles Martin Frank  and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Allen Adler, chose to take their cue from ALPSP and on January 20th issued a letter to NIH Director Francis Collins asking for his executive intervention:

“To the extent that NIH has not negotiated with and obtainedpermission from the journal publishers who own the copyright in the respective articles, including images and other illustrations, it is our view that such use is a derivative work and an unauthorized expansion and extension of the limited rights granted NIH, and as such would violate copyright law. To the extent that NIH has not negotiated with and obtainedpermission from the journal publishers who own the copyright in the respective articles, includingimages and other illustrations, it is our view that such use is a derivative work and an unauthorized expansion and extension of the limited rights granted NIH, and as such would violate copyright law.”

I cannot and do not speak for either party in this disagreement, just  report that I personally find the NCBI images database useful and authoritative in leading pubic users to the authoritative deposited articles. NCBI itself asserts that users of images and articles must seek to understand their rights under fair use and must comply with either publisher or author copyright.

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.

The mission statement of the AACR and its Foundation for the Prevention and Cure of Cancer lays out a compelling rationale for individual and corporate support of their efforts:

• Prevent and cure cancer through research, education, communication and collaboration
• Foster cancer research and related biomedical science
• Accelerate the dissemination of new research findings among scientists and others dedicated to the conquest of cancer
• Promote science education and training; and advances the understanding of cancer causes, prevention, diagnosis and treatment throughout the world.

On September 5th 2008 the AACR launched a well-orchestrated media-driven appeal for contributions, Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C), which was acknowledged to have garnered at least $100 million in contributions and pledges (the 2008 IRS Form 990 for AACR shows a impressive 240% increase in contributions, no doubt attributable to this campaign). 

I would certainly seem like some sort of curmudgeon to cast aspersions on the noble cause of curing cancer.  I have relatives and friends that have cancer and have not survived cancer. I just happen to believe that with the kind of revenue generated by SU2C  and with the mission articulated above, there is a historic opportunity for AACR to acknowledge and support the accellerated dissemination implicit in the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).  Essentially, this legislation proposes to make manuscripts reporting on federally funded research publicly available within six months of publication in a journal, improving on the standard adopted in the current NIH Public Access Policy which states that NIH funded research is accessible to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.  FRPAA also expands the requirement for public access to 10 other federal agencies besides the NIH.

The AACR is on record opposing FRPAA as an institutional publisher signatory of an allied publisher opposition letter posted online.  The AACR publishes six highly regarded scientific journals: Cancer Research; Clincal Cancer Research; Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention; Cancer Prevention Research; Molecular Cancer Therapeutics;  and Molecular Cancer Research. Many of the articles published in these popular journals are based upon NIH-funded research and follow the traditional copyright transfer publisher policy: Authors who wish to publish articles and other material in AACR journals must formally transfer copyright to AACR.

The consolidated business statement for 2008 shows that the AACR journal publishing program continues to  generate profit, relative to the costs of production (publication expenses $9,698,644, publication income $14,239,945). No doubt that the ability to maintain subscriptions and advertising is supporting the prosperity of the AACR and their own version of the expansion of the fight against cancer.  My own opinion is that they should carefully reconsider the decision to oppose the FRPAA legislation, given the success they have had in appealing to the public to be generous in directly funding their own AACR research agenda.  These are the same taxpayers, after all, many directly confronting cancer.

I was reading a recent  interesting article, A Toolkit For E Health Partnerships In Low-Income Nations,  in a non-open access journal, Health Affairs, expecting to find some mention of open access biomedical publishing playing some sort of major or minor role in this toolkit.  I also knew that the publisher of this journal was originally on board and publicly on the roster of the DC Principle publishers that banded together to resist open access and the NIH public access policies. Frankly, it still bothered me that a journal with editorial focus on public health and sponsored by an organization with a name like Project Hope was trying to resist the tide of open knowledge, a obvious source of hope for so many that cannot afford material.

The good news: Health Affairs (the journal) is on the HINARI roster of Publisher Partners (though the Publisher, Project Hope, is not… go figure)

More good news: Project Hope, the publisher, is not represented as a signatory on the latest DC Principle objection to the Federal Research Public Access Act

Now to the innocent or deliberate omission (I guess you will have to have a subscription to verify this). The toolkit article was presenting a persuasive discussion that organized information is a critical part of delivering high-quality, efficient health care and promoting both electronic health records and evidence based practice in global health settings.  Towards the end of the article following descriptions of recent partnerships to improve the funding conditions for health partnerships, the authors state their intention to “identify six key steps that should be undertaken, and four obstacles and challenges that must be overcome, for these partnerships to accomplish the most good.”  What follows are five (5)  steps…not six.  Briefly,

1. Dissemination of details of successful partnerships
2. The funding of new multidisciplinary relationships among academic, public, and private partners.
3. Support for mentoring relationships between successful and new partnerships.
4. Development of training programs to support the effective use of e-health tools in developing countries.
5. Ensuring local commitment.

Now is the absence of the sixth step merely an editorial oversight? Well, you can fill in your own step 6. , but here is my own hypothesis.  Suppose the sixth step read something like:

“Support the use of institutional repositories to provide timely access to partners in health informatics research, as well as further disseminating public health scholarship to serve the interests of emerging health informatics programs in economically challenged countries.”

Perhaps some editor that either recites the DC Principles every morning or considers  green open access (pre- or post-prints in institutional repositories) to be intolerable just decided to strike it….then realized changing the introduction to five would draw the attention of an author.

I will send this post to the authors to confirm my suspicion and invite them to comment on my idea for the missing sixth key step.  Or they will dash my dream

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.