Illustration credit: Brian E. Smith
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.
Advertisement
The bill would cover a huge percentage of research material—the NIH, just one of 11 agencies affected, funds over 70,000 papers per year—and if reasonably up-to-date findings are available to all online, who needs Physical Review Letters? Major titles would be less damaged by the proposed legislation because they publish more frequently and are therefore more current. "However," said a spokesman for Nature Publishing Group, "we recognize that other publishers will be severely affected."
The most-threatened publications typically serve a niche community of researchers and function as anthologies for highly specialized fields. Without revenue from their pricey subscriptions—Brain Research costs $23,617 a year—there's not much left. "You have to wonder if librarians, whose budgets are being constantly constrained, are going to make a judgment like, 'Well...my faculty users can wait six months until this is free,'" said Kenneth R. Fulton, publisher of PNAS.
With US journals moving toward open access, publishers in the UK, Australia and elsewhere are beginning to pay close attention.
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.