The battle over public access to federally funded research is heating up again, and university presses have been drawn into it. In the past week, several scholarly publishers, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s press, have parted company with a major publishing association over a bill in Congress that would curb public-access mandates.
U.S. Reps. Darrell E. Issa, Republican of California, and Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, introduced the bill, known as the Research Works Act (HR 3699), last month. The bill would forbid federal agencies to do anything that would result in the sharing of privately published research—even if that research is done with the help of taxpayer dollars—unless the publisher of the work agrees first.
If passed, the bill would undo policies such as the National Institutes of Health’s public-access mandate, which requires that the results of federally financed research be made publicly available within 12 months of publication.
The proposed legislation arrives at what could well be a crucial time for such federal mandates; the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy just closed a period of public comment on public access to research.
It’s not at all certain that the Research Works Act stands much chance of becoming law. Similar legislative efforts in recent years have failed. But the new bill’s existence has public-access advocates up in arms, and it has exposed yet again differences among publishers about how much control over access to the research they publish they’re entitled to.
Last month the Association of American Publishers came out with a strong statement of support for the proposed legislation. Many commercial publishers of research journals, including major players such as Elsevier, belong to the association. A number of university presses are members of its Professional and Scholarly Publishing division. They include the presses of MIT, the University of California, and the University of Oxford.
Breaks With Group’s Position
Last week, the MIT Press became the first to distance itself publicly from the association’s stance.
“The AAP’s press release on the Research Works Act does not reflect the position of the MIT Press; nor, I imagine, the position of many other scholarly presses whose mission is centrally focused on broad dissemination,” Ellen Faran, the press’s director, said in a statement circulated on open-access electronic mailing lists and elsewhere. “We will not, however, withdraw from the AAP on this issue as we value the association’s work over all and the opportunity to participate as a member of the larger and diverse publishing community.”
Several other members of the publishers’ association followed suit. The University of California Press, the Pennsylvania State University Press, and the Rockefeller University Press have also said they do not support the bill or the association’s position on it. (Richard Poynder, a longtime chronicler of the open-access movement, has been tracking the responses closely on his Open and Shut? blog.)
“The issues raised by Research Works Act are complex and we welcome continued informed debate on this topic,” the California press said in a statement. “Our perspective on these issues differs from that of AAP, and we are committed to engaging closely with scholars from all disciplines in exploring new models that retain critical features such as quality control, long-term preservation, and measures of impact and use.”
Another association member, the nonprofit Ithaka group, also said it did not support the bill. Ithaka oversees JSTOR, the subscription service that archives many scholarly journals. “A core principle of our organization is to provide the broadest possible access to scholarly works in ways that are sustainable and account for their long-term preservation,” Ithaka said in a statement. “We have no intention of endorsing RWA.”
In a conversation with The Chronicle, Ms. Faran of the MIT Press said that membership in the publishers’ association gives her press a useful professional network to draw on, a point made by the other objectors as well. “Not to take advantage of the expertise and the resources would be foolish and ineffective,” she said.
That doesn’t mean every member press loves the positions the association takes, or even that it knows about them ahead of time. Ms. Faran said the statement supporting the Research Works Act took her by surprise.
Neglected Nuances
The MIT Press publishes about 30 scholarly journals, which account for about a quarter of its income, she said. The press allows authors to share pre- and post-print versions of articles from those journals, and the Research Works Act “is not congruent with our other open-access policies,” she said.
That’s only one reason she weighed in on the bill. “I also felt that the discussion that was going on was nowhere near nuanced enough,” Ms. Faran explained. “It just was not recognizing the many complexities that are part of this.”
The salvos traded over public access don’t acknowledge “all the players in this complicated and interconnected world,” she said. Mandates deal with access to research but not how to pay for all the services that go into publishing it.
No one in scholarly publishing these days “has as much money as they wish for anything,” Ms. Faran said. “People forget that a huge driver of this is the economy.”
Many commercial publishers cite peer review as one essential ingredient they add to the publishing process. That claim rankles public-access advocates, who point out that most of the work involved in peer reviewing is freely contributed by scholars.
Unlike some of her commercially oriented colleagues in the publishers’ association, Ms. Faran is careful not to take credit for the scholarly labor behind the peer review involved in journal publishing. But she emphasizes the contributions a university press like hers makes. That includes selecting the best work for its imprints, copy-editing, “robust Web hosting,” making research discoverable, and marketing and outreach.
“We haven’t figured out how to do all that and make it totally open,” she said. “We feel that figuring out how to do that at a reasonable price is an important contribution that doesn’t always get acknowledged.”
