Open Access News

Gavin Baker, OA at TACD IP, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, January 17, 2009.  Last week Gavin was live-blogging the TACD's Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance conference (Washington DC, January 12-13, 2009).  Now he has summarized the presentations that bear most on OA, and added some comments of his own.  Excerpt:

..Two panels (at least) mentioned [OA] explicitly: the panels on Openness and on Innovation and Access for Medical Technologies. I’ll try to summarize what was notable:

Openness: Tim Hubbard of the Wellcome Trust: ...

• There is an effort to develop a “PubMed Commons”, building on top of PubMed Central, adding e.g. features for comments and tags.
• Recommendation: Policies for OA to publications and data should become standard for research funders.
• There are some problems remaining: ...OA to data: cultural attitudes (e.g. how to give credit/attribution, adjusting to new competitive environment — people interpreting your data before you can), practical problems (e.g. format standardization)
• The focus of the presentation was on the conflict between openness (e.g. OA to genetic data) and privacy. Even supposedly de-identified data can be re-identified, posing a challenge to OA to data on human subjects. He suggested a solution where researchers could have free access to the complete data (with full granularity), but without handing it out in raw form: researchers could load programs onto a trusted broker’s computer, which would execute the algorithm and provide anonymized results....

Comments:

• How many funders actually have open data requirements for their grantees? This seems like a good topic for the Open Access Directory: collecting information on funder policies, as well as on projects and institutions with open data policies for their intramural researchers. This is such a nascent space that there’s a big role for sharing best practices here....

Openness: Heather Joseph of SPARC:

• There is a growing but limited awareness among policymakers of the benefits of openness. We need policies to remove both access and permission barriers to research. So far most uptake of OA policies has been in the biomedical arena. There’s pushback from opponents even there.
• There’s a recognition that data is valuable and needs to be appropriately managed. But we need to move from mere “data management policies” toward open access to data.
• So far, the signs from the Obama administration are promising....
• Recommendation: Make OA policies throughout the government, e.g. through executive order or regulation, but not as part of IP policymaking.

Comments:

• I think this is the first time I’ve heard the suggestion that the U.S. adopt OA policies for its publicly-funded research via executive order or regulation. There’s some sense to this, I think: it has to do with the internal management of the government and doesn’t run afoul of any legislation. I see two challenges, though. First, other funding agencies don’t have the pre-existing cyberinfrastructure into which grantees could deposit their articles; funding for that has to come from somewhere (e.g. through the appropriations process). Second, as we saw with the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act”, there’s some opposition to these policies in Congress: some members might take issue with executive policymaking — but I think that’s a fight we could win, especially with the administration on our side.

Openness: Questions:

• Bruce Perens: What about other IP on publicly-funded research, e.g. Bayh-Dole? Joseph: We need to draw a distinction — we’re focusing on access to the literature and data.
• Jamie Love: If there was an access to knowledge treaty, what specific issues would you want to include? Hubbard: OA data and literature; mandated protection of private data; greater openness to economic data; standards for government data. Joseph: OA literature and data.
• Jonathan Band: Some countries hold copyright on government works (Crown copyright — unlike the U.S.) — this needs to change.

Comments:

• There’s a little surge of discussion lately about patents (and the management thereof) on publicly-funded research, e.g. owing to developments in India and South Africa. It’s an issue I’ve been involved with before, and I’m sympathetic toward efforts to improve the current system. There are some common principles, but they’re also very different questions. Specificity, so we can understand well what we’re discussing, is important in policy, and especially in these areas, which are often so challenging to understand. So: OA can advance without affecting the Bayh-Dole system; the Bayh-Dole system doesn’t necessarily do harm to OA....

Innovation and Access for Medical Technologies: Judit Rius of Knowledge Ecology International: ...

• Recommendation: Innovation inducement prizes should include an “open source dividend” to encourage open sharing of knowledge, data, material, and technology
• Recommendation: Governments should support the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (as adopted in World Health Assembly resolution 61.21), including open access to scientific articles and data from publicly-funded research

Comments: ...

• OA advocates shouldn’t forget about the WHO’s Global Strategy, which includes very favorable language toward OA. It’s worth mentioning when speaking with funders, policymakers, researchers, etc. Unfortunately, the language as adopted in WHA 61.21 only said that states should “strongly encourage” publicly-funded researchers to make their manuscripts OA,retreating from earlier language that states should “require” it. Still, as we saw with the NIH policy — maligned as the earlier voluntary policy was (and rightly so), it laid the groundwork for a mandatory policy (establishing a repository, starting to educate researchers, gathering evidence on the policy’s impact and effectiveness, building a constituency in favor of OA, etc.). We have a document representing global consensus that governments should support OA: we should remind people of that more often.