A life-and-death battle is going on over public access to federally financed research — life for taxpayers and many scientists, and death for publishers. Or so each side claims. That battle, whose outcome will affect many university researchers, kicked into high gear on Capitol Hill on September 11, as the combatants debated the merits of a bill that would curtail the public-access policy of the National Institutes of Health.
The hearing, held by a House of Representatives subcommittee, did not lack for drama. It featured pleas by Nobel Prize winners, a story of how open access helped soothe an anguished mother, and warnings that intrusions by the “hairy snout” of federal regulation could destroy the economic basis of publishing.
The NIH policy that triggered the skirmish went into effect in April. It requires that all researchers whose work is financed by the NIH submit electronic copies of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, a free online archive of biomedical and life-sciences journal articles, and that the material be made publicly available within 12 months of publication.
Many publishers have argued that a free archive means that no one will pay for their journals anymore. They tried to derail the policy last spring and succeeded in getting Congress to specify that it be consistent with copyright law.
That point is the focus of the bill, HR 6845, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which seeks to amend the statutes governing the NIH policy. Under the legislation, copyright holders would not be required to make the results of federally financed research freely accessible to the public. Scientific research is the most obvious target of the bill, but it could affect scholarly work in other areas as well.
The bill was introduced this week by John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing took place before the panel’s Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.
‘Vital’ for Science
Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH, led off by making a passionate case for PubMed as “a vital component of 21st-century science.” He presented a timeline of breakthroughs related to the Human Genome Project to demonstrate what he called “a true explosion in scientific discovery,” one accelerated by researchers’ access to unprecedented amounts of data.
The NIH’s public-access policy, Dr. Zerhouni argued, helps speed up the pace of discovery by making knowledge widely available. “We fully believe it is consistent with copyright law,” he said. He also pointed out that the NIH policy allows publishers to take up to a year after publication before they have to make articles publicly available, a period during which they can sell them as they please.
Heather D. Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc, expressed “serious reservations” about the legislation. Her group speaks for many research libraries, which have been stalwart supporters of public access. Undoing the NIH policy, she said, would limit taxpayers’ access to “crucial, health-related information that can make a life-or-death difference in the lives of the American public.”
Her voice cracking, Ms. Joseph drove the point home in an anecdote about her 5-year-old son, recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. “I got online and looked for every piece of current information I could get my hands on,” she said. “I did this from home, at 3 in the morning the night we got home from the hospital, desperate for information that could reassure me that there was something else I could do besides wake my child up twice a night to check his blood sugar for signs of hypoglycemia.”
She found what she was looking for in a 2008 study of continuous glucose monitors — reported in a manuscript posted only a month earlier under the NIH’s public-access policy. “It was worth the world to me,” she said.
Threat to Publishers
Ralph Oman, a copyright lawyer who lectures on intellectual-property law at George Washington University Law School, made the case to the committee that “a mandatory federal policy requiring these works to be made available for worldwide distribution is in inherent conflict with copyright” and would threaten publishers’ continued existence.
“My basic concern about the NIH proposal is that it will, sooner rather than later, destroy the commercial market for these scientific, technical, and medical journals,” Mr. Oman said. Later, during a question-and-answer session, the lawyer got a laugh by asking whether people really wanted “the hairy snout of government” poking around in science publishing.
The Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division and the Association of American University Presses issued separate statements of support for the bill. The university-press association wrote that its members “strongly support open access to scholarly literature by whatever means,” as long as those means allow them “to keep older work available and continue to publish new work.”
But the group warned that “trying to expand access by diminishing copyright protection in works arising from federally funded research is going entirely in the wrong direction and will badly erode the capacity of AAUP members to publish such work in their books and journals.”
That concern could also be heard in the testimony of Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes scientific journals. He repeated the publishers’ argument that they make “a significant value-added contribution” to the research they publish, even if the NIH pays for it. “Articles should not be taken from those of us responsible for their creation,” he told the subcommittee.
One group was not well represented in the wrangling: the scientists who actually do the research being fought over, as noted by one subcommittee member, Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California. Most of these researchers sign their copyrights over as a condition of being published. One glimmer of how some of them feel came in an open letter to Congress submitted by 33 Nobel winners in chemistry, physiology, and medicine.
“The current move by the publishers is wrong,” the laureates wrote. “The NIH came through with an enlightened policy that serves the best interest of science, the scientists who practice it, the students who read about it, and the taxpayers who pay for it.”
No further action on the bill has been scheduled, and sources told The Chronicle that they doubted it would come to a vote during the current session of Congress. But the testimony was a bracing reminder that the war over public access is far from over, no matter how Mr. Conyers’s legislation fares.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 55, Issue 5, Page A12
