On March 29, 2012, at 9:30am, the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight held a public hearing to examine Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests.

Two pieces of legislation provoked this hearing.  In early February House Representatives Mike Doyle (D-PA), Kevin Yoder (R-KS), and Lacy Clay (D-MO) reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies.  This legislation frames the issue of public access as a taxpayer expectation.  The Committee also expects to receive a report in the coming weeks on this issue from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, as directed in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, which addresses U.S. research and development  to improve the competitiveness of the United States. This frames public access as either an enabler of research and development or a threat to the competitiveness of US Publishers, in particular scholarly society publishers.

Although the distinguished speakers had only about 5 minutes to summarize their perspective, each was allowed to submit written remarks that become part of the hearing record.  Here are the speakers providing testimony and a link to their submitted remarks.   I also took the liberty to copy the main remarks of each speaker  and use the tag cloud site TagCrowd to create a word visualization of the each speakers 50 most used words (eliminating common words, and a word has to be used a minimum of 5 times).  Here is the testimony links (click on the witness name for the PDF of the submitted remarks)  and results:

Witnesses

Michael P. Taylor,  one of the Sauropod Vertebra weekly image-posters that recently emerged as a commentator on scholarly communication from his academic vantage point,  made a worthy attempt this week at telling readers of TheScientist  about the dysfunctional system of academic publishing that continues to be idealized, resuscitated, and defended, albeit mostly by publishers and their lobbyists.   No competing interest there.   

Mr. Taylor suggests (and I agree) that there probably is more ignorance than fear and loathing among faculty ranks.  This is something that librarians can fix.

Taking a look at the March 5th anti-FRPAA letter being trotted around by lobbyists, there are probably about 50 scholarly societies and associations on the signatory list. Each of these organizations represent dedicated faculty providing the labor-intensive peer review and editing activity in what little time can be gleaned from teaching, mentoring, grant management, and their own scientific research.  Senior faculty provide credibility, authority, and status for journals published by a scholarly society. Junior faculty are concerned about their own academic standing and success that become evidence for a permanent academic appointment.

Every faculty member is connected to libraries and librarians that provide resources and services.  Library liaison and outreach activities increasingly include NIH open access policy publication support, knowledge management education for institutional translational science programs, and essential literature searching for evidence-based systematic review development. In my opinion,  faculty collaboration with  information professionals during the scholarly processes of discovery, organization, writing, and publishing  is more interactive and appreciated.

Librarians can also educate their faculty constituencies on scholarly communication issues, the risks of substandard peer review, and the costs of providing knowledge to their academic community. Here is some of the scholarship from the library and academic medicine community that cites the growing influence of librarians on academic publishing and scholarly communications.

Brower SM. Medical education and information literacy in the era of open access. Med Ref Serv Q 2010 Jan;29(1):85-91.(subscription required)

Koehler BM, Roderer NK. Scholarly communications program: force for change. Biomed Digit Libr 2006 Jun 21;3:6.

Plutchak TS. Searching for common ground: public access policy and the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. J Med Libr Assoc 2010 Oct;98(4):270-272.

Sperr EV,Jr. Libraries and the future of scholarly communication. Mol Cancer 2006 Nov 7;5:58.

Koehler and Roderer speak most directly to the type of initiative that I envision for every academic medical center library:

• Conversations and forums to raise scholarly communication issues,  educating faculty about the issues and encouraging  appropriate practical actions.
• Web sites to promote awareness of scholarly communications issues, initiatives, and practices while offering an interactive space for users’ responses.
•  Detailed information conveniently arranged about a journal’s publisher, impact factor, local usage statistics, and opinions of local authors who have published in particular journals to comment on their own experiences with publishers.
• Using all types of student and faculty encounters to make sure that scholarly communications brochures were available and that these meetings provide another opportunity to educate constituents to the changing world of publishing.
• Consistent and persistent faculty engagement.

The Koehler and Roderer article concludes:

Scholarly communication is approaching a crossroads. If the current system is unsustainable, as many believe, and if technology has changed the landscape of publishing, then a time for serious decision-making is at hand. There is a role for the libraries and librarians in this enterprise – continuing to support authors and to disseminate scholarly communications information until there is an economically sustainable system that provides the widest possible access to scholarship. The goal of the Hopkins’ scholarly communications initiative has never been to undermine the world of scholarly publishing. It is not necessary to make everything free for libraries or to put publishers out of business. Indeed, our goals are to ensure that Hopkins authors know what their rights are, that they manage their own work in a way that benefits science as well as their own needs, that they understand the business plans and philosophy of the journals they work for, and that they take control of their own publishing destinies.

I want to compliment the analysis done by Declan Butler in the Nature news blog about the open access shot heard round the world. I’m referring to the announcement that three top-shelf life science foundations– the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Wellcome Trust (WT), and the Max Planck Society (MPS)– are intending to fund the launch of a premier journal without an author processing fee (at least to start). Declan made many good initial observations and was honest with his reservations.  Probably every open access blogger wants to add to the conversation and not parrot the insights of others.

I immediately thought of the European Research Council commitment to public access that set a guideline for a tolerable non-open embargo by publishers for EU-funded research at six months.  The U.S. National Institute of Health Public Access Policy, well intentioned and certainly precedent setting, is nevertheless fixed for NIH funded research at a political compromise of 12 months.  Two-thirds of this partnership are the leading foundation advocates for the benefits of open research knowledge in Europe.  HHMI has also embraced the philosophy of public accessibility and in its Research Policies of freely available and down-loadable on-line research results within six months of publication.  The assembled partnership for this endeavor seems to be on the same page, comfortable with the idea of using their not-for-profit ethos and funding capability to assert the merits of open knowledge for the needs of the research community and extend the boundaries of scientific knowledge that can be immediately accessible and inspire students and researchers anywhere.  At least that is the goal.

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 and 2010 was proposed twice in the  U.S. Congress to move toward the a reduced non-open embargo of six months and expand the qualification of any research to all federal agencies that spend more than US$100 million in extramural research, including the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Energy, to name a handful granting agencies.  The Senate version of the bill was “Read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.” The House version of the bill was re-introduced in 201o and “Referred to the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives. “ The general paralysis of our federal legislature has drawn attention away from both the merits of expanding public access in the U.S. and the notion of parity on public access with a European counterpart.  But now three not-for-profit organizations, unencumbered by politics, are making a statement about non-governmental advocacy.

We live within a global scientific community and communication network. As a statement of global open scientific knowledge solidarity, the announcement of this future journal returns attention in the life sciences world to the practical merits of open knowledge.  And a shudder must be felt among publishers, not so much at the most credible open access pioneers with unquestionable commitment to peer review, but among commercial publishers that were relying on their own status or credibility to launch gold open access options while maintaining traditional submissions from scientists that still considered an accepted publication as a golden ticket, regardless of their ability to share it or whether they owned the copyright or how much their library paid for electronic access to that journal.  I foresee  a noticeable uptick in interest to understand open access publishing options in the life sciences and also understanding qualitative factors among a growing variety of open access publishing choices.

The Big Think site brought this video to my attention.  As this is a teaching blog, I think it is worth watching, if you are unfamiliar with this notion of who pays and what are the most sustainable models of open access.  

Panelists: Mike Rossner, Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press; Ivy Anderson, Director of Collection Development and Management at the California Digital Library; and Bettina Goerner, Manager, Open Access for Springer.Date: March 9, 2010 Sponsor: Columbia University Scholarly Communication Program

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.

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‐fundedresearch, 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.”   Ouch! I will address this in a different blog post.

He added, “For over a century, non-profit and commercial publishers have served as the government’s partner in fueling scientific discovery and innovation. The presumption now that taxpayers should have free access to peer-reviewed journal articles seriously discounts the considerable contributions of our industry and highly skilled workforce of some 50,000, who are driving the US knowledge economy and supporting our leadership in science.”

On August 2nd, In Discovery, rediscovery, and open access: Part 1, Peter Suber, Berkman Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Researcher at SPARC, the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. has another perspective:

“The NIH research budget is more than the GDP of 140 nations.  When taxpayers devote that kind of money to research, they can maximize the return on their investment by ensuring that the results are available to all who can build on them.  In addition, the cost of an NIH-funded research project can be hundreds or even thousands of times greater than the cost of publication.  To allow its results to be held hostage by publishers is the same mistake on a different scale as spending billions on a Large Hadron Collider and locking up the results in toll-access publications.”

He also said, “Leaving access barriers any higher than necessary means slowing the process of inquiry and wasting more effort and resources than necessary.”

So there are the opposite ends.  Some librarians and publishers are looking for a middle way to expand access, like the American Physical Society that I blogged about earlier this week, which is at least offering to put free access to their scholarly journals into public libraries in a nod to taxpayers.

I really encourage my readership to read the testimony from the FRPAA hearing.  In a democracy, the will of the majority becomes more important than the personalities.  I applaud the House subcommittee for putting the prepared testimony on the web for public digestion, as well as archive the webcast:

Opening Statement of Subcommittee Chairman Wm. Lacy Clay (available from the webcast)

Prepared Testimony of Mr. Allan Adler

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Steven Breckler

Prepared Testimony of Professor Ralph Oman

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Richard Roberts

Prepared Testimony of Ms. Sharon Terry

Prepared Testimony of Mr. Elliott Maxwell

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Sophia Colamarino

Prepared Testimony of Dr. David Shulenburger

Prepared Testimony of Ms. Catherine Nancarrow

Additional Document 1 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Additional Document 2 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Additional Document 3 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Prepared Testimony of Dr. David Lipman

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 American Society for Microbiology(ASM) is one of the most distinguished and successful biomedical science publishers.  ASM is already a full participant in PubMed Central for all of its non-open journals, offering free access at six months after publication, in effect already complying with the six month intent of the FRPAA legislative proposal. Now an open access journal has been added to the ASM journal publication lineup:

As ASM’s first broad-scope, online-only, open access journal, mBio™ will offer rapid review and publication of the best research in microbiology and allied fields. The new journal will continue ASM’s non-profit publishing mission and will be edited by scientists involved in active research. mBio™ will be published in association with the American Academy of Microbiology, from which editors and reviewers will be recruited.  AAM Fellows also will be entitled to submit one paper per calendar year via a special, accelerated submission path. Authors will retain copyright and grant ASM a nonexclusive license to publish their work if it is accepted. Upon publication, the work becomes available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a  Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. For more details and conditions, see the instructions for authors page for the new journal.

Thomas Shenk, ASM’s Publications Board Chairman and a Princeton Professor, is interviewed about this open access venture in an mBio™ podcast available from their blog.

No doubt the impact factor success of PLoS Pathogens in the Microbiology category of Journal Citation Reports and its similar broad approach to microbiology was useful ammunition in getting ASM and the Academy behind mBio™.

PLoS will be at the 100th meeting of ASM later this month.  Competition is never a bad thing…right?

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.

The 4th annual open access week will take place October 18-24, 2010. In an effort to build a collaborative environment, the organizers at SPARC have enlisted the Ning social networking  software (note that Ning is announcing the elimination of free Ning networks on May 4th).

When you register for access to the Open Access Week Ning site, you will provide and make available to others some information about yourself, then have the opportunity  join an existing working group or create a new one. For instance, I created an advocacy group within the the Open Access Week Ning site to focus on the passage of FRPAA, effectively reducing the mandatory US NIH research deposit in Pubmed Central from 12 to 6 months, the standard already existing in most European countries (yes, FRPAA applies to by eleven U.S. federal agencies, opening up a large amount of interdisciplinary federal research with biomedical implications.

Please consider joining the Open Access Week Ning site.