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Library Groups and Open-Access Advocates Speak Out Against Bill

January 26, 2012, 11:44 am

A coalition of 10 library and open-access advocacy groups has sent a letter to Congress opposing HR 3699, the controversial Research Works Act. The American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, Creative Commons, the Public Library of Science, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc, are among those who signed the letter. The proposed bill “would unfairly and unnecessarily prohibit federal agencies from conditioning research grants to ensure that all members of the public receive timely, equitable, online access to articles that report the results of federally funded research that their tax dollars directly support,” the letter says. “Unfortunately, HR 3699 is designed to protect the business interests of a small subset of the publishing industry, failing to ensure that the interests of all stakeholders in the research process are adequately balanced.” Some scholarly associations and researchers have also weighed in against the Research Works Act.

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  • http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/ Stevan Harnad

    See: 
    “Research Works Act H.R.3699: 
    The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again”

    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html

    EXCERPT:

    The US Research Works Act (H.R.3699): “No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that — (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.”

    Translation and Comments: 

    “If public tax money is used to fund research, that research becomes “private research” once a publisher “adds value” to it by managing the peer review.”

    [Comment: Researchers do the peer review for the publisher for free, just as researchers give their papers to the publisher for free, together with the exclusive right to sell subscriptions to it, on-paper and online, seeking and receiving no fee or royalty in return].

    “Since that public research has thereby been transformed into “private research,” and the publisher’s property, the government that funded it with public tax money should not be allowed to require the funded author to make it accessible for free online for those users who cannot afford subscription access.”

    [Comment: The author's sole purpose in doing and publishing the research, without seeking any fee or royalties, is so that all potential users can access, use and build upon it, in further research and applications, to the benefit of the public that funded it; this is also the sole purpose for which public tax money is used to fund research.]”

    H.R. 3699 misunderstands the secondary, service role that peer-reviewed research journal publishing plays in US research and development and its (public) funding.

    It is a huge miscalculation to weigh the potential gains or losses from providing or not providing open access to publicly funded research in terms of gains or losses to the publishing industry: Lost or delayed research progress mean losses to the growth and productivity of both basic research and the vast R&D industry in all fields, and hence losses to the US economy as a whole.

    What needs to be done about public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research?

    The minimum policy is for all US federal funders to mandate (require), as a condition for receiving public funding for research, that: (i) the fundee’s revised, accepted refereed final draft of (ii) all refereed journal articles resulting from the funded research must be (iii) deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (iv) in the fundee’’s institutional repository, with (v) access to the deposit made free for all (OA) immediately (no OA embargo) wherever possible (over 60% of journals already endorse immediate gratis OA self-archiving), and at the latest after a 6-month embargo on OA.

    It is the above policy that H.R.3699 is attempting to make illegal…

    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html

  • sand6432

    Wouldn’t a better policy be to have the government post online immediately upon final approval all reports submitted to agencies as a result of taxpayer-funded research, rather than have to wait for over 12 months (because the process of peer review and publisher processing itself takes months to accomplish) to access this research in a form that is not the final form in which it is actually published in journals? If people are concerned about peer review (which serves a particular need for the academic community but not necessarily for the general public, including scientists, as witness the success of arXiv), then why not have the experts do the peer review of the final research reports for the government rather than the later written journal articles issued by the publishers? Since publishers don’t pay the experts to do the reviews anyway, there would be no extra cost to the government in having the peer review done at this earlier stage except what it took to organize the solicitation of reviews. Given the timeliness especially of new medical research that members of the public are eager to find out about as soon as possible and in as authoritative form as possible, asking them to wait for well over a year to get a not fully final version seems a less efficient way to achieve the objective of rapid dissemination of reliable information than the alternative I am suggesting.—Sandy Thatcher

  • mbelvadi

    I’m a definite supporter of open access, but Sandy’s suggestion sounds reasonable to me. But I don’t know anything about the reports he describes. Can some scientists who get govt research grants respond to this, and say whether those reports are appropriate for this purpose? Do they contain all of the information that you’ll also put in the publishable article version?  Do they contain material that should not be released to the public?

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