While there is lots of legislation that Public Knowledge disagrees with, we can often see the rationale for it. Not so with H.R. 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, now introduced for the second Congress in a row by House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), and co-sponsored by Reps. Steve Cohen (D-TN), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Darryl Issa (R-CA) and Robert Wexler (D-FL). This bill would have the effect of overturning the “open access” to research policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires that research funded by the agency to be made available for free in an online archive within 12 months of publication. The rationale for this policy is simple - if taxpayers are going to pay for research, taxpayers should get a return on their investment by getting free online access to that research. This is the same rationale driving some of the conditions on the stimulus bills being debated right now - government can, and in this case especially should, put public interest conditions on the money it spends.
So why would Rep. Conyers, considered a champion of the public interest, introduce this bill? News reports indicated that the Chairman was upset because he believed that the House appropriators seized what he believed to be a copyright issue from his Committee.
But open access doesn’t require any change to copyright law and it doesn’t diminish anybody’s copyrights. In the vast majority of cases, a scientist will simply give his or her copyright to a journal publisher. So the scientist loses nothing (and in fact, gains a great deal, not only in financial remuneration, but also in greater public access). The publisher doesn’t lose its copyright either, and is unlikely to lose many, if any subscriptions, since journals often contain research that is both government funded and privately funded and add value in ways that a simple open access archive cannot. Indeed, as PK’s Open Access Director Peter Suber has documented, proprietary peer-reviewed journals thrive side-by-side with open access archives in a variety of scientific disciplines, including physics.
An example of where “open” and “closed” access to information work side by side is access to legal decisions. Thanks to the hard work of our friend and IP3 award winner Jamie Love, access to most judicial decisions is free in places like Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institutue. Yet Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw thrive, and at very high prices Why? Because the proprietary services add value to the information with, for example, user-friendly interfaces and a better search engine.
Open access to government supported research is not only the proper response to ensure that taxpayers get a return on their investment, it is consistent with President Obama’s vision of greater public access to government information, more government transparency and increased accountability. Chairman Conyers and his House colleagues should not allow a jurisdictional dispute undermine these critical goals.
Read Peter Suber’s take on the bill here.
In some sense, the NIH rule
In some sense, the NIH rule is a bit like forced patenting. At the very least, one would think that it would encourage patenting. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know, but if you publish your research, you have one year to file for a patent on it. 18 months later, the application gets published by the USPTO, although I think you can file for early publication, so you could probably use the patent application publication to satisfy the NIH requirement.
btd - There is another
btd -
There is another analogy here. Like government funding, a patent is a benefit (short term monopoly), granted by the government. When government gives, it can also make resonable demands on that gift.
Aaargh…. Yet another
Aaargh…. Yet another conflicting definition of the phrase “open access” — different still from the ones bandied about before the FCC and in the stimulus bill. I guess this shows that lobbying in DC is built on two and three word slogans, and there aren’t enough unique ones to go around….
Gigi, I worked in
Gigi,
I worked in NIH-funded research labs for over 10 years, and I can tell you that this has little to do with Conyers’ hurt feelings. It’s about money, plain and simple. As with many of the industries that PK covers, academic publishing has seen a wave of consolidation over the past decade. Today, nearly every journal is controlled by a single conglomerate: Reed Elsevier. It’s probably no surprise that their PAC made a rather sizable contribution to Conyers in 2008.
The company also spent $3 million lobbying for this type of legislation.
They made this investment because “open access” does indeed hurt their bottom line. I believe you are incorrect to assume no effect on subscribership. The only “added value” that journals offer is prettier fonts. When reading an article, it makes absolutely no difference whether the text is laid out in columns or not—the experience and time required are identical. As far as searching and indexing, it doesn’t matter where the article is published—every scientist already uses the same taxpayer-funded tool called Pubmed (www.pubmed.gov).
Big publishers like Elsevier don’t make most of their money from individuals, but rather from large institutions. The University of California, for instance, negotiates a single subscription for every user at all 10 campuses. I know for a fact that if we had true “open access,” the UC Office of the President would drop its subscription to ~80% of Elsevier’s journals.
I’m not sure this type of open access is the best solution. After all, just because a scientist receives money from the NIH, this doesn’t mean he owes the public free access to every thought and interpretation he should ever publish. What if I win the Nobel prize, and write a book about my research? Do I need to make the book available for free as well?
Here’s the real answer: make all NIH grant proposals open access. Why are these confidential in the first place? Scientists already include all the data and conclusions from their papers inside the grant. This would give the public free and open access to everything that happens in an NIH-funded lab.
Here are some responses to
Here are some responses to DB:
The analogy to forced patenting is weak. Some researchers may not intend to patent their discoveries. But all researchers covered by the NIH policy intend to publish their research. We know this because the policy only applies to published articles. The NIH policy merely widens the reach or distribution of the work they have already published.
You’re right that the publishing lobby is motivated by money. But that doesn’t mean that Conyers is motivated by money. His public statements make very clear that thinks his committee had jurisdiction over the NIH policy and that the Appropriations Committee should have deferred to it or at least consulted it. There’s a turf war going on here even if there’s a lot more going on as well.
While publishers fear that the NIH policy will cost them money, they don’t have any evidence yet of cancelled subscriptions. They were asked for this evidence at the September 2008 hearing and came up dry. There is evidence of reduced downloads from their sites, but not evidence that the reduced downloads are translating into reduced subscriptions. If they had cancellations they could attribute to the NIH policy, they would produce them.
The NIH policy does not apply to books. Nor does it apply to lab notes. It only applies to articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
Peter, The reason that
Peter,
The reason that publishers aren’t losing money is because the current policy isn’t really full open access. In the exciting, fast-based world of biomedical research, 12 months is a lifetime. Recognizing that subscribers are shelling out big money for access to timely, cutting-edge research, most journals offer their back issues for free anyway.
As a taxpayer with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, why shouldn’t I have access to research as soon as it’s released? If you believe that taxpayers are entitled to see the research that they’ve funded, what is the point of a delay?
DB: I don’t defend the
DB: I don’t defend the delay. On the contrary, I’ve argued from the start that 12 months is much too long. The NIH is the only medical research funder in the world which allows a 12 month embargo on the OA distribution of the research it funds. All the others cap the embargo period at six months.
In my view, any embargo period is a compromise with the public interest. I can live with some compromise in order to adopt an otherwise strong policy. But there was no need for NIH to bend this far in order to accommodate publishers.