Panel Urges Free Public Access to Results of Government-Backed Research

A panel of university administrators, librarians, and publishers has released a report urging federal agencies that pay for research to develop policies “expeditiously but carefully” that support free public access to the results of that research “as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.” The 14-member Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last year by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science and Technology and was led by John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities. Two members, Y.S. Chi of Elsevier and Mark Patterson of the nonprofit Public Library of Science, did not endorse the report’s findings. In a statement, Mr. Patterson wrote that the panel’s recommendations “will significantly improve the currently limited access to federally funded research” but said that they do not go far enough “to unleash the full potential of online communication to transform access to and use of scholarly literature.”