Last week, without much hoopla, the Department of Energy announced it had a plan for how to increase public access to the results of research it pays for. Unless you’re a grantee who might be directly affected, or a publisher, librarian, or open-access advocate whose job requires you to keep tabs on such developments, you probably missed the news altogether.
But the announcement marks a new, pragmatic phase in the struggle between competing philosophies of how widely published research should be shared, and how quickly. And the policy makes its debut just as publishers and library and university groups are testing new mechanisms of their own to help research move more efficiently in a networked environment. Over the next year, how these pieces of scholarly-communication machinery mesh—or clash—should become a lot more clear.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy gave the access issue a big push in February 2013, when it issued a memorandum calling on federal agencies that spend more than $100-million a year on research to come up with plans for making the results of that research public. With last week’s announcement, the Energy Department became the first federal agency to reveal how it intends to comply with the White House’s call. (The first, that is, beyond the National Institutes of Health, which has had a public-access policy in place for several years, relying on its PubMed Central repository.)
The department will use a web-based portal, the Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science, or Pages, to give the public free access to peer-reviewed manuscripts or journal articles within 12 months of publication. (The portal will use a “hybrid model” that will provide direct access to article metadata and point users to full-text articles hosted on publishers’ websites or in other repositories.) The system is in a beta phase now, and it will evolve over time as the department gets feedback from researchers, grant makers, publishers, and other interested parties.
‘Some Pretty Big Holes’
Nobody is entirely happy with the department’s plan so far. As presented, it leaves a lot of critical details to be worked out, such as whether readers and researchers will be able to text-mine, data-mine, or otherwise reuse articles. That’s a sore point for access-advocacy groups like Sparc, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which said in a statement that without those reuse rights spelled out, “a crucial principle of the White House directive cannot be realized.”
The plan is “certainly not as strong as we were hoping it would be,” said Heather Joseph, Sparc’s executive director. “There are some pretty big holes in it.”
The Association of American Publishers, on the other hand, doesn’t like the 12-months-after-publication timeframe—the department calls it an “administrative interval"—that the policy lays out. “Our principal concern is its assumption that a universal 12-month embargo is sustainable for all disciplines. It is not,” the association said in its own statement. (Publishers tend to favor longer embargoes, although that’s not true in every case or, as the association says, in every field.)
Still, partisans on both sides say, the policy is a starting point—something concrete to respond to and work with. Meanwhile, other agencies affected by the White House memo are busy working on their own plans, which have to be approved by the Office of Management and Budget and by the Office of Science and Technology Policy. A spokeswoman for the National Science Foundation said her agency had sent its plan to the science and technology office several weeks ago. Look for more policies to go public over the next few weeks and months.
One big concern: How much of a pain is it going to be for researchers and their institutions if the plans turn out to be very different from one another? “The biggest worry is that we’re going to be looking at a number of different agency plans with very different requirements,” says Prue Adler, associate executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. “It’s going to be very difficult for campuses if there’s not more uniformity.”
But attempts by publishers and by groups representing libraries and universities to shape public access go far beyond how they decide to respond to each agency’s plan. The Department of Energy said it would turn to the nonprofit Chorus, the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States, to help it connect users to research; Chorus was created by publishers after the White House memo last year, and it just declared itself “open and ready for business” at the end of July. And the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities have banded together to create Share, the Shared Access Research Ecosystem, which has been developing a notification system to alert grant makers, university research offices, and others whenever a “research-related activity” involving them occurs (when a grant-supported article is published or deposited in a repository, for instance).
It’s not a direct response to the White House memo, according to Greg Tananbaum, a consultant who’s leading Share’s product development.
But the rising pressure for greater public access here and abroad has “created a timely opportunity for the higher-education community to better structure its strategies and its systems for managing its publications and its data, says Mr. Tananbaum, and Share very much wants to play a part in that restructuring. Whatever federal agencies decide to do, he says, higher education “is uniquely positioned to play a leading role in the good stewardship of research.”