Open Access News

When Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 this spring, many scientists had a warm fuzzy feeling: The bill would require any published paper drawing on research funded by a major US government agency to be put online within six months, enabling anyone with Internet access to obtain the latest scientific research.

But science publishers are not feeling the love. The bill is part of a global open access movement that is forcing the scientific community to re-address how it publishes research. In 2005, Research Councils UK recommended that all public funded studies be made available; this year, the European Commission advised EU countries to adopt an open-access policy. But, despite its noble aspirations, Cornyn-Lieberman could throw a monkey wrench into the works of scientific publishing. "Government agencies are going to become publishers competing against the [original] publishers," said Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society (APS), which publishes 14 journals....

Cornyn-Lieberman joined an open access movement that has exploded in recent years, thanks largely to the NIH: In the late 90s, then-director Harold Varmus laid the groundwork for PubMed Central, an online archive of biology-related research. In 2000, the Nobel Prize-winner co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit that publishes the increasingly well-regarded open access journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. That same year, APS decided to offer free access to articles older than a year "because we thought it was the right thing to do," said Martin Frank. And titles like Nature, Science, PNAS, JAMA and The New England Journal of Medicine are granting free access to older articles and/or allowing authors, after a lag time, to link to articles from their personal web pages. In 2005, the NIH instituted its public access policy, which asks NIH-funded investigators to submit peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central within 12 months of journal publication....

[T]he UK's Wellcome Trust last year began requiring its investigators to provide peer-reviewed articles within six months of publication, and an effort urging the Australian Research Council to adopt a similar system is also underway.

PNAS now allows authors to make articles available online for a fee of $1,000. About 19% of PNAS authors have elected to do so, and according to a recent study, these papers are over twice as likely to be cited...as articles in subscriber-model journals. A 2005 international survey of researchers found that 29% had published in open access journals, up 18% from 2004. "Authors appear to be being influenced by the accumulating evidence that open access leads to greater usage and citation of their articles," said Mark Patterson, director of publishing for PLoS. In fact, in 2004's "Journal Citation Report," Thomson Scientific found the young PLoS Biology had a higher impact factor than the respected Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, the pricey Brain Research [$23,617 a year] and the venerable PNAS....

Comment. A good overview except that it doesn't challenge Martin Frank's groundless claim that FRPAA will make the US government into a publisher.  FRPAA only applies to articles already published by independent peer-reviewed journals.  The OA copies of the articles that the government will host will differ from the published originals, and be inferior to the originals, unless the publishers themselves consent to let the government host the published editions.  And of course the government copies will not be OA until six months after the originals were published.  Publishers who worry that OA archiving will undermine subscriptions rarely mention that a study commissioned by their own ALPSP (March 2006) found that high journal prices far surpassed OA archiving as a cause of journal cancellations.