Open Access News

What does the legislation mean for investigators?

If Congress passes the bill into law, the most significant day-to-day effect on investigators will be improved access to research and increased impact for their own work. A growing number of studies demonstrate that research is cited more often when it is openly accessible on the Web....

What does it mean for higher education institutions?

This legislation will mean enhanced access to federally-funded research articles for researchers and students at your institution. Availability of federally funded research in open archives also will expands the worldwide visibility of the research conducted at your institution, increases the impact of your investment in this research, and aids you in examining related work at other institutions that compete for Government grants and contracts.

Because it will improve access to science, the legislation is supported by various national organizations of academic libraries - including the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, Association of College and Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)....

Is the legislation a threat to journals and the peer review they perform?

No. The Federal Research Public Access Act contains two key provisions that protect journals and the peer review process:

• A delay of up to six months in providing access to articles via the public archive (versus immediate access for journal readers).
• Inclusion in the public archive of the author’s final manuscript rather than the publisher’s formatted, paginated version preferred for citation purposes.

In some disciplines, freely accessible online archives have proven to be a supplement to journal readership, not a replacement for it. In physics, for example, where nearly 100% of new articles are freely available from birth in the arXiv.org open-access archive created more than a decade ago with US Department of Energy funding, subscription-based journals have continued to thrive. The American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics Publishing are unable to identify any subscriptions lost as a result of arXiv in the 14 years of its existence.  Likewise, in a report to Congress on the results of its Public Access Policy, NIH reported that it “has no evidence to indicate that the Policy has had any impact on peer review.”...

Will this legislation take funding away from research?

Not to any material extent. The National Institutes of Health, for example, estimates that the cost of its public access program would be $3.5 million if 100% of the 65,000 eligible manuscripts were deposited annually. That is a tiny fraction (about 0.01%) of the agency’s $28 billion budget. It is also a small fraction of the $30 million per year the agency spends on page charges and other subsidies to subscription-based journals. The reality is that sharing of research results is part of the research process. Faster and wider sharing of research fuels further advances.