The National Science Foundation, in carrying out the Obama administration’s new push for greater public access to research published in scientific journals, will consider exclusivity periods shorter than the 12-month standard in the White House directive, as well as trade-offs involving data-sharing and considerations of publishers’ financial sustainability.
“I don’t think it’s going to be one or another of these precooked systems,” Myron P. Gutmann, the NSF’s assistant director for social, behavioral, and economic sciences, said of that agency’s plans. “We’re going to be flexible and open to challenges.”
The administration’s directive, announced on Friday after two years of deliberation, asks agencies that sponsor research to impose a 12-month upper limit on how long journals can hold subscription-only rights to articles describing research that was financed with federal funds.
The National Institutes of Health adopted such a requirement almost five years ago, and now all other federal agencies that spend at least $100-million a year on research and development are being given six months to draft a similar policy. The NIH announced this past November that it would soon begin enforcement by blocking the renewal of grant awards in cases where journal publications arising from the awards do not comply with its open-access rule.
The NSF, the largest provider of federal money for basic scientific research after the NIH, will very likely follow the NIH in setting a 12-month period of exclusivity as its general rule, said Mr. Gutmann, a professor of history and a professor of information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
“It isn’t unreasonable to think that in a lot of cases it’ll be a 12-month embargo,” said Mr. Gutmann. “But I hate to say it for sure because we really haven’t gotten that far yet.”
And, Mr. Gutmann said, the decision isn’t necessarily a simple calculation of how short a period of exclusivity publishers can tolerate while receiving enough subscription revenue to stay in business. There could be other trade-offs involved, such as the types, amounts, and formats of data that will be made available to the public, and the needs of specific academic fields and people within those fields, he said.
“I’m not sure fast is always the right question,” Mr. Gutmann said. “I think it’s optimal exposure, and timing is only one part of that.”
Years of Debate
The White House science adviser, John P. Holdren, in announcing the new policy on Friday, described an expansion of public access to federally financed research as important to economic growth.
“Scientific research supported by the federal government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators,” Mr. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a written statement.
Demands for open-access research have generated years of heated debate involving publishers, universities, researchers, and various advocacy groups. The NIH instituted its 12-month policy in April 2008, but only after strenuous objections from private publishing companies that fought back against an original proposal for six months.
Congress has refused to pass a governmentwide mandate, despite several years of attempts by some lawmakers. And only a year ago, the Obama administration appeared to have given up on the idea, after a year of studying the question, said John C. Vaughn, executive vice president at the Association of American Universities, a group of top research institutions.
In the end, the plan outlined by Mr. Holdren does “a very good job of balancing interests” of libraries, universities, researchers, and publishers, Mr. Vaughn said.
Industry representatives appeared to agree. In a statement issued Friday, the Association of American Publishers said the new policy “outlines a reasonable, balanced resolution of issues around public access to research funded by federal agencies.”
Just a week earlier, the publishers association issued a caustic denunciation of legislation proposed in Congress that would give journals only six months of exclusive rights to articles describing the findings of research conducted with federal financial support.
An association of academic and research libraries that has pushed for open access, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, also welcomed Friday’s announcement, but said it would continue pressing Congress for passage of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, the bill that would require a six-month limit.
Calls for Greater Access
Others are also pressing for the government to do more to ensure the unfettered circulation of knowledge generated by taxpayer dollars.
Tax money indirectly covers “the vast majority of the costs of publishing,” said Michael B. Eisen, an associate professor of genetics, genomics, and development at the University of California at Berkeley. And taxpayers get “a really really watered-down product for their money,” with publishers restricting access and owning the rights, he said. “It’s nuts.”
The 12-month exclusivity window in the Obama administration’s plan would be the maximum period of time that agencies could impose in their policies. But 12 months seems too big a hindrance to researchers, Mr. Eisen said, as the first year is when scientific findings are of greatest use.
And the plan described by Mr. Holdren has several provisions that appear favorable to publishers, including an appeals process through which journals can seek adjustments in the rules if they can show significant financial harm from the new open-access policies that will be established by the various federal agencies.
The White House plan also asks the agencies to coordinate with one another, to minimize the possibility that the 11 affected agencies will set 11 different policies, said Mr. Vaughn, of the Association of American Universities. And after it receives proposals from each agency in six months, the White House plans to make its own efforts at synchronizing the agency policies, he said.
At the same time, the agencies will be asked to consider circumstances unique to their operations or academic disciplines that could lead to varying terms for particular journals or specialties, said Mr. Vaughn, who led a Congressionally organized scholarly-publishing roundtable that settled on many of the ideas that appear to have informed the White House plan. Some journals feeding articles to the NIH’s open-access system, PubMed, do so after only three or six months of exclusive access for subscribers, he said.
Government officials aren’t expected to review publishers’ profit margins, Mr. Vaughn said. But setting exclusivity periods is “a little more than guessing,” he said, since some publishers already made their articles free after 12 months even before the NIH required it.
Still, while publishers can appeal if the exclusivity period seems too short, there’s no comparable method in the White House plan for open-access advocates to argue that publishers could survive with even shorter exclusivity periods, Mr. Gutmann acknowledged.
The White House policy also pushes agencies to consider how to make the databases accumulated by federally supported researchers available to the public, along with their journal articles. Long-running discussions on that topic, however, have largely centered on the best ways of carrying it out, not on any major disagreements involving publishers or others on whether to actually do it, Mr. Vaughn said.
Journals also face pressure in finding enough qualified reviewers—one of the key contributions they make to the process of publishing scientific research. A major issue there, however, is the huge growth in international journal submissions without a corresponding growth in the ability of U.S.-based journals to recruit and use foreign reviewers, Mr. Vaughn said.
Eventually all journals appear headed toward an open-access model, Mr. Vaughn said, with their work probably being financed by fees paid by authors. One example, he said, could be Britain, which recently adopted a policy of mandatory open-access publishing, with author fees covered at least in part by universities and the government.