Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. While any kind of digital content can be OA, there are two compelling reasons why the worldwide OA movement has focused on peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints.
The first reason reason is that most scholarly journals do not buy their articles or pay royalties to authors. Since the birth of scientific journals in 1665, researchers have given away their work in exchange for intangible rewards such as visibility, impact, prestige, certification for career advancement, and a time-stamp to establish their priority over other researchers working on the same problem. As a result, researchers can consent to OA for their journal articles without losing revenue. This makes them very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA for music and movies do not carry over to research literature.
Second, in the sciences most journal articles are based on funded research, and most funded research is funded by taxpayers. Citizens and policy-makers immediately see the logic of providing public access to the results of publicly-funded research, especially in fields with great potential for public benefit, such as medicine.
Background
For more background on OA, see the following:
Public Knowledge launched its Open Access Project in July 2003 and has worked energetically for OA in the U.S. ever since. The project is directed by Peter Suber. We are active members of the Open Access Working Group and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. We work with other friends of OA, such as library associations, universities, and non-profit patient advocacy organizations, to enact and strengthen US policies to provide OA to publicly-funded research.
We also participate in the international campaign for OA. We helped draft OA provisions in the Access to Knowledge Treaty (for the WIPO Development Agenda) and the Medical Research and Development Treaty (for the World Health Organization).
Most of our OA work consists of educating policy-makers and the public about OA, working for specific pro-OA legislation, and counteracting anti-OA lobbying from the publisher trade associations.
The Public Knowledge Position on Open Access
Public funding agencies in every country should require open access to publicly-funded research, with reasonable exceptions for classified research, patentable discoveries, and research published in royalty-producing forms such as books. The permissible embargo period, or delay after publication, should be no more than six months.
Universities should deposit copies of all journal articles published by faculty, and all approved dissertations by graduate students, in their own OA repository. (This is compatible with non-OA publication of the same works.)
Individual researchers should either submit their work to peer-reviewed OA journals or deposit copies in OA repositories.
Bills to Foster Open Access
In July 2004 Congress asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require OA for all articles based on NIH-funded research, within six months of publication. The NIH developed a much weaker policy, under the influence of intense lobbying by publishers who oppose OA as a threat to profits. The policy that took effect in May 2005 merely requests OA, without requiring it, and the agency has not been able to raise the compliance rate above 5%. It also extends the permissible delay (“embargo period”) from six to 12 months. Agency oversight panels and Congress have both tried repeatedly to strengthen the policy, and since April 2006, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the NIH, has himself supported these efforts and asked Congress to strengthen the policy. But so far the bills to do so have not passed. The current LHHS appropriations bill, approved by the House and awaiting action from the Senate, would convert the OA request to a requirement. It’s scheduled for a vote in the week of October 15, 2007.
Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced the CURES Act in December 2005, and Sen. John Cornyn introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) in May 2006. Both would require OA to federally funded research from a range of agencies, including the NIH, and both would permit a maximum embargo period of six months. The CURES Act would require OA to all research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, and FRPAA would require OA to most research (in effect, all non-classified research) funded by the EPA, NASA, NSF, and eight cabinet-level departments. Neither reached the floor for a vote in the 109th Congress, but Sen. Cornyn plans to re-introduce FRPAA in the current session.
Public Knowledge supports the strengthening of the NIH policy, converting it from a request to a requirement and shortening its embargo period. We supported the CURES Act and FRPAA, and when FRPAA is re-introduced, we will support it again.
