These are heady days for the disciples of open access. The Obama administration has set a one-year limit on journals’ charging readers for articles derived from federally sponsored research. Some states are weighing similar steps. And a majority of peer-reviewed articles, according to a new tally, are now in open formats.
But in other realms of public access to publicly financed research, the situation remains murky, and may be getting even more opaque.
About half the states have laws that let state universities keep some details of their research activities secret until publication or patenting. And officials at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who are eager for their state to join that list, predict the pressure for such protections will only grow stronger as states face mounting pressure to turn their university research operations into revenue.
State lawmakers must realize, said William W. Barker, the institution’s director of the Office of Industrial Partnerships, that a public university is a cherished asset and needs to be treated accordingly.
The primary threat, Mr. Barker said, comes from outsiders—sometimes faculty members at other institutions—who use his state’s freedom-of-information rules to poach ideas from University of Wisconsin scientists.
It’s a matter of “economic competitiveness,” he said, made even more urgent by this year’s change in federal law giving ownership rights to the first person to file for a patent rather than to the person who can prove the earliest development of an idea.
Others aren’t so sure. Despite several months of prodding by the university, Wisconsin lawmakers have declined to act on the proposal. And a key opponent of the idea, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a coalition of media organizations have argued that state law already lets the university keep research data secret if a release can cause harm, including economic harm.
The council’s president, Bill Lueders, has challenged the university’s rationale, saying he’d be surprised to see instances of outside faculty members’ filing freedom-of-information requests against University of Wisconsin rivals. “That seems to be poor form,” he said.
Pressed on the matter, Mr. Barker could not provide specific examples involving state law. He and his staff found records of two requests from researchers at out-of-state universities seeking details of research conducted at Madison, but both were submitted to the National Institutes of Health under federal law.
Mr. Barker said that the university remained worried about the threat, especially given the change in federal patent law.
Other states agree, Mr. Barker said. University legal experts have identified at least 25 other states that have some explicit protections against the prepublication release of research information, he said.
Requests From Activists
In a memorandum prepared for state lawmakers, university officials suggested a law making clear they could withhold virtually any research data until they have been “publicly released, published, or patented.”
“Nobody’s talking about keeping research results secret, because we’re going to publish them—it’s a public institution,” Mr. Barker said. “It’s just a matter of timing, that’s all we’re talking about.”
Beyond the issue of economic competitiveness, the university has made clear that animal-rights groups also factor into its thinking. Two groups, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a Wisconsin ally, Alliance for Animals and the Environment, have been trying to pressure the university to halt experiments with animals.
They’re upset by research like that carried out by Tom C. Yin, a professor of neuroscience whose work is aimed at improving human hearing. Part of Mr. Yin’s work involves cats, and PETA used open-records requests to obtain and publish photographs that show a cat with metal sensors screwed into its skull.
The university wants to block such requests for reasons that include the costs, largely staff time, that it takes to process them, Mr. Barker said. There’s also the risk that researchers and other university staff members, even after combing their records to answer requests from groups such as PETA, might fail to redact something of unrecognized importance that could help an economic competitor or violate an agreement with an outside partner, he said.
Mr. Lueders rejects the university’s arguments. Animal-related records processing may cost $100,000 a year—the number cited by the university in its memo to lawmakers—but that’s a fraction of the university’s tens of millions in annual research dollars, he said.
Mr. Barker contends that every research dollar is valuable, especially in a tight economy.
Leaders in the movement for open-access journals, waging their own battles to have articles financed by authors rather than readers, see themselves as separate from any fights over prepublication access.
“It is really contentious,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, calling the states “all over the board” on what disclosure protections, if any, they afford their researchers.
Some of those restrictions seem understandable from a university’s perspective, Ms. Joseph said. But over all, she said, they don’t seem in line with the sense—demonstrated empirically in open-access studies—that everyone does better when information is more widely shared.
Economic Benefits
John W. Houghton, a professorial fellow at Victoria University, in Australia, has carried out a series of economic analyses of open-access publishing in various countries. He has found that a full open-access system produces substantial and widespread economic benefits, but that early adopters among both countries and universities bear the burden, since they have to pay for journal subscriptions while financing their own authors.
A study financed by the European Commission and released last month estimated that, in the United States and several other countries, half of all papers are now freely available within a year or two of publication.
A committee of the California Legislature approved a bill this year requiring free access to state-financed research, and Illinois passed a bill last month urging a similar move by its public universities.
As for limiting prepublication disclosures, the Wisconsin Legislature is proving difficult to predict. Lawmakers rebuffed an initial request, and university leaders admit they’re still battling anger over the discovery this year that the institution—at a time of tight budgets—was keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in accounts that some lawmakers felt were not fully disclosed.
“It hurt a lot of things” affecting the university, Mr. Barker said of the accounts. “It hurt this, and a lot of things.”
