Open Access News

(2) Messrs. Frank and Glassroth complain that the NIH (the world's largest funder of medical research) "underwrites only about 10 percent of the research published each year." What bothers them is hard to discern. It seems to be that users will not get the full picture if they rely only on NIH-funded research. True. But thanks to skyrocketing journal prices, it's also true that users will not get the full picture if they rely only on the holdings of a medical school library. Instead of praising a gigantic first step toward more adequate access, they criticize its incompleteness, as if no literature should be easy to access until all of it is. (3) They complain that the manuscripts the NIH will put online will be peer-reviewed but not copy-edited. They cite errors that survive peer review but are caught by copy editors. They could just as easily have cited errors that survive both layers of scrutiny [or errors added by copy editing]....If the problem is making fallible literature easier to access, then all published literature should be harder to access, slowing medical research to a crawl. If the problem is reducing the quality of literature available to the public, then it's illusory. Free online access to peer-reviewed medical research raises the average quality of free online medical claims. If the problem is depriving the public of the marginal improvements provided by copy-editing, then the solution lies in the hands of publishers, like Mr. Frank, who complain about it. The NIH policy allows publishers to replace the authors' version of the peer-reviewed manuscript with the published, copy-edited version. Mr. Frank is the Executive Director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals. He could solve the problem he cites and set an example for other publishers if he would take advantage of this opportunity afforded by the NIH....(5) Messrs. Frank and Glassroth...[compare] research to wheat. "The government also subsidizes wheat growers, but they still sell their grain, and no reasonable person asks those who produce bread from that wheat to give their bread away for free." This is a very bad analogy. Wheat is rivalrous (to use a term from economics), which means that possession or consumption by one person excludes possession or consumption by others. But knowledge is non-rivalrous. It can be shared by everyone without diminishing possession or consumption by anyone. There is a huge difference, therefore, between giving taxpayers free access to publicly-subsidized wheat and giving taxpayers free access to publicly-subsidized knowledge. (6)...The cost of the NIH program is $2 million to $4 million per year, which comes to 0.01 percent of the NIH's $28 billion budget. Study after study has shown that free online access increases the impact of research literature, as measured by citations, 50 percent to 250 percent. Free online access makes NIH research more useful, which is good for science, good for taxpayers and good for health care.