[GOAL] Fwd: Harvard response to the White House RFI on OA to publicly funded research

[Stevan Harnad]

Dear all:

The deadline for responding to the White House RFI on OA to US
federally funded research has been extended to January 12.
http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28623/request-for-information-public-access-to-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications-resulting-from

Please do respond, individually or on behalf of your institutions (as
the Provost of Harvard, Professor Alan Garber, has done, below).

The responses will have much greater effect if they share a consensus
on the bare minimum essentials, which are to mandate (require) that:

(i) the fundee's peer-reviewed, revised, accepted final draft

(ii) of  all peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from federally
funded research

must be

(iii) deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication

(iv) in the fundee's institutional repository.

(v) Access to the deposit must be made gratis OA (online access free
for all) immediately (no OA embargo) wherever possible (over 60 % of
journals already endorse immediate gratis OA self-archiving).

For details and nuances about what could be encouraged beyond the bare
minimum essentials (e.g., no embargo, libre OA, copyright
reservation), see
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/865-guid.html
and the Harvard response, below.

Stevan Harnad


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Suber <peter.suber -- gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 2:33 PM

Friends:  Here's the Harvard response to the publications RFI.
Since it has already been submitted, feel free to quote from it
with attribution, or to revise and adapt any of its arguments ad lib.

 Peter

Peter Suber
gplus.to/petersuber


----------cut here----------

Harvard University
Office of the Provost
Massachusetts Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138
T.617.496.5100
F.617.495.8550

December 21, 2011

To:  Office of Science and Technology Policy
Executive Office of the President
725 17th Street Room 5228
Washington, DC 20502

From: Alan M. Garber, Provost
Harvard University

Re: Harvard response to the White House RFI on OA publications

I write on behalf of my colleagues at Harvard University in response to
the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy request for
information on "Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications
Resulting From Federally Funded Research." In summary, we strongly
support White House action to require and enhance public access to
government-funded research. We provide our general recommendations, as
well as more detailed responses to the eight particular questions that
were called out in the RFI below.  However, we emphasize that decisions
on many of the detailed issues under discussion here and in the other
responses to the RFI are secondary to the general principle of requiring
public access.

We endorse the view that every federal agency funding non-classified
research should require free online access to the full-text,
peer-reviewed results of that research as soon as possible after its
publication. There are three powerful reasons to take such a step.
First, taxpayers deserve access to the results of taxpayer-funded
research.  It is their right.  Second, public access maximizes the
visibility and usefulness of this research, which in turn maximizes the
return on the public's enormous investment in that research. Third,
public access accelerates research and all the benefits that depend on
research, from public health to economic development, manufacturing, and
jobs.

The United States already recognizes the public interest in amplifying
the impact of publicly funded medical research. A strong public-access
policy has been in place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
since April 2008. But the same interest calls on us to amplify the
impact of publicly funded research in every field, from alternative
sources of energy to American history and culture. The NIH policy has
been good for professional researchers, good for lay readers, good for
medical professionals, good for patients, good for the NIH, and good for
taxpayers.

If the NIH policy is flawed, it is for allowing needlessly long delays
before the public gains access to this body of publicly funded research,
and for allowing needless restrictions on the public use and reuse of
this research.  The NIH policy should be strengthened in these two
respects and the strengthened version of the policy should be extended
across the federal government.

Even Harvard University, whose library is the largest academic library
in the world, is not immune to the access crisis motivating much of the
campaign for public-access policies. In fact, the Harvard library system
has had to make a painful series of budget-driven journal cancellations,
and we are deciding on a set of further cancellations at this very
moment.

With respect to some of the specific questions posed in the request for
information, we provide our recommendations below.

(1) Are there steps that agencies could take to grow existing and new
markets related to the access and analysis of peer-reviewed publications
that result from federally funded scientific research? How can policies
for archiving publications and making them publically accessible be used
to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific
enterprise? What are the relative costs and benefits of such policies?
What type of access to these publications is required to maximize U.S.
economic growth and improve the productivity of the American scientific
enterprise?

We will separate the economic from the non-economic questions in this
cluster, and address them separately.

Are there steps that agencies could take to grow existing and new
markets...?  How can policies for archiving publications and making them
publically accessible be used to grow the economy? ...What are the
relative costs and benefits of such policies?

Yes, there are steps to grow new and existing markets arising from
access to cutting-edge research.  The most important step is to require
public access (also called open access and free online access) to the
final versions of the authors' manuscripts of peer-reviewed articles
arising from publicly funded research.

Businesses need access to cutting-edge research to stimulate innovation,
for example to develop new medicines, reduce the size and energy
requirements of computer chips, strengthen lightweight composite
materials, reduce harmful emissions from fossil fuels, increase the
efficiency of solar panels, and make food safer.  Public access to
publicly funded research nourishes R&D in these industries, allowing
them to develop new products, improve existing products, and create
jobs.

The question is not whether useful, publicly funded, basic or
pre-competitive research will continue.  Even in an age of budget cuts,
it will continue.  The question is whether we will make the results of
that research easily available to all those who can make use of it, or
whether we will allow it to be locked down by a private interest at the
expense of the public interest.

In March 2011, the UK Science Minister, David Willetts, held a
Roundtable on precisely these topics.  (Disclosure:  Two members of the
Harvard community were invited participants.)  Willetts released the
results of his ministry's deliberations in mid-September.  One of his
chief conclusions is directly pertinent to the current RFI:
http://nds.coi.gov.uk/content/Detail.aspx?ReleaseID=421232&NewsAreaID=2

Research stimulates and fuels innovation and economic growth. So, to
maximise UK innovation we need to maximise access to and the use of
research findings.


Just last month (December 2011) the UK Department for Business,
Innovation and Skills converted the Willetts Roundtable results into
national policy.  From the Department's executive summary:
http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-and-researchstrategy-for-growth.pdf

To succeed in the global innovation economy, the UK must strengthen its
ability to accelerate the commercialisation of emerging
technologies....We [seek] to ensure that government policies stimulate,
rather than hinder, UK innovation through...[i]ncreasing access to
public data or to knowledge created as a result of publicly funded
research.


In October 2011, the HOST consulting group addressed the same set of
topics in a report commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC), "Benefits to the Private Sector of Open Access to
Higher Education and Scholarly Research," October 2011.  Excerpt from
the HOST/JISC report:
http://open-access.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2011/10/OAIG_Benefits_OA_PrivateSector.pdf

A substantial body of research literature establishes the benefits to
private sector businesses of publicly funded research. Mansfield
(1991,1995,1998), Beisea and Stahle (1998) and other studies provide
evidence of tangible economic benefit, in particular in terms of product
innovations achieved and revenue gained through enhanced sales. The work
of Houghton et al. (2011) confirmed these conclusions and also drew out
the benefits of access to research in terms of shortening product and
service development cycles. This study confirms the importance placed by
businesses on access to scholarly research and its broad impact in terms
of product, service and process innovation....Open Access publishing
provides a way of opening much more university and scholarly research to
the business sector....[M]ost businesses spend considerable amounts of
time working around paywalls....The review suggests that, at a time of
accelerating pressure on SME [small and medium-sized enterprises]
competitiveness, a shift to Open Access would create significant cost
savings by enabling businesses to review more quickly the relevance of
individual papers and act accordingly. By boosting discoverability OA
may also add value directly to levels and speed of knowledge transfer in
this part of the economy.


The HOST/JISC report cites the research of economist John Houghton at
Victoria University in Australia.  Houghton has done the most extensive
and careful research on the economic impact of national open-access
policies.

One of Houghton's most recent studies, commissioned by Denmark's Agency
for Science, Technology, and Information [Forsknings- og
Innovationsstyrelsen, or FI], focused on how public access helps small
and medium-sized businesses:  "Access to Research and Technical
Information in Denmark," FI, April 2011.  Among his findings:
goo dot gl/pfAf6

Research articles, patent information, scientific and technical
standards, technical and market information were seen as the most
important information sources [for small and medium-sized businesses,
SMEs]. Forty eight per cent rated research articles as very or extremely
important, and among those in research roles a higher 64% did so....More
than two-thirds reported having difficulties accessing market survey
research and reports and Doctoral or Masters theses, 62% reported
difficulties accessing technical reports from government agencies and
55% reported difficulties accessing research articles....[R]esearch
articles and market survey research and reports are seen to be both
important and difficult to access....Use of Open Access materials is
widespread. More than 50% used free institutional or subject
repositories and Open Access journals monthly or more regularly, and
among researchers 72% reported using free institutional or subject
repositories and 56% Open Access journals monthly or more
regularly....Access barriers and delays involve costs. It would have
taken an average of 2.2 years longer to develop or introduce the new
products or processes in the absence of contributing academic research.
For new products, a 2.2 years delay would cost around DKK 36 million
(EUR 4.8 million) per firm in lost sales, and for new processes it would
cost around DKK 211 000 per firm.


An earlier Houghton study focused on the United States:  "Economic and
Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research
Outputs [in the United States]," SPARC, August 4, 2010.  From the
summary:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers/vuFRPAA/index.shtml
http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/vufrpaa.pdf

Preliminary modeling suggests that over a transitional period of 30
years from implementation, the potential incremental benefits of the
proposed FRPAA [Federal Research Public Access Act] archiving mandate
might be worth around 8 times the costs. Perhaps two-thirds of these
benefits would accrue within the US, with the remainder spilling over to
other countries. Hence, the US national benefits arising from the
proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be of the order of 5 times the
costs.


These results confirm Houghton's September 2006 study on Australia:
"Research Communication Costs in Australia:  Emerging Opportunities and
Benefits." Excerpt:
goo dot gl/Rnnns

Expressing these impacts as a benefit/cost ratio we find that, over 20
years, a full system of institutional repositories in Australia costing
AUD 10 million a year and achieving a 100% self-archiving compliance
would show: [1] A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of
open access to public sector research (i.e. the benefits are 51 times
greater than the costs); [2] A benefit/cost ratio of 30 for the modelled
impacts of open access to higher education research; and [3] A
benefit/cost ratio of 4.1 for the modelled impacts of  open access to
ARC [Australian Research Council] competitive grants funded research.

Finally, a Houghton study from July 2006 used conservative assumptions
to conclude that an OA policy could add billions to the U.S. economy:
"The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings." Excerpt:
http://www.cfses.com/documents/wp23.pdf

With the United State's GERD [Gross Expenditure on Research and
Development] at USD 312.5 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of
50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency [Houghton's conservative
estimate] would have been worth USD 16 billion.


Some publishers have criticized John Houghton's research, and are likely
to repeat their criticisms in this RFI.  We ask the OSTP to look closely
at Houghton's methods and data rather than taking the judgment of
stakeholders who have an economic interest in dismissing his
conclusions.  In our judgment, JISC (on Houghton's behalf) and Houghton
himself have adequately answered all these criticisms.

JISC Response [on behalf of Houghton et al.] to:  Some comments prepared
jointly by The Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and
Professional Society Publishers and the International Association of STM
Publishers on the report "Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly
Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits" by Houghton et al.
& Oppenheim et al., commissioned by JISC (published January 2009)

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/responseoneiaspmreport.pdf


John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim, "Widening access to research
information: A response," January 2010.

http://www.cfses.com/EI-ASPM/Comments-on-Hall(Houghton&Oppenheim).pdf


Public access not only facilitates innovation in research-driven
industries such as medicine and manufacturing.  It stimulates the growth
of a new industry adding value to the newly accessible research itself.
This new industry includes search, current awareness, impact
measurement, data integration, citation linking, text and data mining,
translation, indexing, organizing, recommending, and summarizing.  These
new services not only create new jobs and pay taxes, but they make the
underlying research itself more useful.  Research funding agencies
needn't take on the job of provide all these services themselves.  As
long as they ensure that the funded research is digital, online, free of
charge, and free for reuse, they can rely on an after-market of
motivated developers and entrepreneurs to bring it to users in the forms
in which it will be most useful.  Indeed, scholarly publishers are
themselves in a good position to provide many of these value-added
services, which could provide an additional revenue source for the
industry.

The Houghton studies (above) show very high benefit/cost ratios for
national publicaccess policies, and we've enumerated (above and below)
some of the specific benefits of such policies for research and
commerce.  For the specific costs of implementing a public-access
policy, the Department of Health and Human Services reports that
"[a]nnual operating costs for [implementing the NIH policy], including
ingest of articles, refinement of the submission system and search
tools, staffing of a help desk and a central coordinating office for
NIH, are approximately $3.5-$4.0 million per year.  This represents a
small fraction [about one one-hundredth of 1%] of NIH's budget authority
of more than $30 billion per year."
http://www.hhs.gov/asl/testify/2010/07/t20100729c.html

Needless to say, every U.S. federal agency funding non-classified
research is significantly smaller than the NIH, and could benefit from
the infrastructure and workflow procedures created and refined by the
NIH.

How can policies for archiving publications and making them publically
accessible be used to...improve the productivity of the scientific
enterprise?

Public access improves researcher productivity in many ways.  By making
published literature more visible and discoverable, public access
prevents unintended duplication of effort.  It prevents delays while
researchers try to gain access to relevant articles they have discovered
but cannot retrieve.  It makes literature available to our hardware and
software, not just to ourselves, and supports a fast-growing ecology of
computer tools for mining and analyzing data and literature.  It makes
literature available to researchers outside the academy, such as those
based at hospitals, museums, non-profits organizations, and for-profit
manufacturing companies.  By enlarging the audience for research, public
access multiplies the chances that prepared users will be able to make
use of the research and translate it into clinical treatments or
marketable products and services.

Some of these productivity gains can be quantified.  See for example
Karim R. Lakhani et al., "The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem
Solving," Harvard Business School Working Paper, October 2006.  Excerpt:
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf

Lack of openness and transparency means that scientific problem solving
is constrained to a few scientists who work in secret and who typically
fail to leverage the entire accumulation of scientific knowledge
available....Our study finds that the broadcast of problem information
to outside scientists results in a 29.5% resolution rate for scientific
problems that had previously remained unsolved inside the R & D
laboratories of wellknown science-driven firms.


What type of access to these publications is required to maximize U.S.
economic growth and improve the productivity of the American scientific
enterprise?

One type of public access merely provides research results online free
of charge.  A second type provides research results free of charge and
free of certain copyright restrictions.  Only the second type frees
research for data- and text-mining, translation, conversion to new
formats, integration with other tools and bodies of research, and other
value-added services.  Hence the second type does far more than the
first to amplify the benefits of publicly funded research.

Limiting the reuse of publicly funded research limits the return on our
investment.  If we are serious about maximizing that return on
investment, we must lift restrictions on use and reuse, not just
restrictions on access for reading.  The public access policy at the NIH
does just the former.

In practice, the way to free an article for use and reuse is to include
a license or permission statement from the copyright holder explaining
what the user may and may not do with it.  An "open license" allows uses
that would otherwise require the delay and expense of hunting down the
rights-holder in order to ask permission.

In August, Phil Malone and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet &
Society released a report evaluating the copyright licensing policies
used by certain public and private funding agencies.  The report
recommended that research funders require the use of open licenses for
funded research.  It articulates nine benefits of open licenses for
researchers and the funders themselves.  Here are the first four:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/OCL_for_Foundations_RE
PORT.pdf

[1] Furthering the core components of the foundation's philanthropic
mission.

[2] Serving to expand the size and speed of the dissemination and
visibility of supported work in ways that mere placement of those works
on grantee or foundation websites rarely could, because of the "viral"
spread of materials that open licenses allow.  The foundation is able to
"do more good with the same money." ...Thus, for example, the Wellcome
Foundation sees unrestricted access as a "fundamental part of its
charitable mission and a public benefit." ...

[3] Enhancing distribution and use of foundation works by greatly
increasing the ease and lowering the transaction costs of users
obtaining "permission" to share and reuse the works.  In the absence of
open licenses, users have to seek specific, individual approval for most
uses or distribution, a process that often delays or deters such uses.

[4] Increasing the impact of the foundation's funding even more when the
open license permits the work to be freely tested, translated, combined,
remixed, repurposed or otherwise built upon, potentially by many
subsequent researchers, authors, artists or other creators anywhere in
the world, as the basis for new innovation, discovery or creation.
Allowing broad adaptation and follow-on innovation can provide a
magnification or leveraging of the original foundation funding that
would be difficult to achieve otherwise.


There are many open licenses.  We recommend the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC-BY) license, which permits any use provided the user
makes proper attribution to the author.  We recommend against licenses
that bar commercial use (such as CC-BY-NC), in part because they would
limit the utility of publicly funded research for businesses and
industry.

This type of public-access policy would not be unprecedented for the
United States.  In January 2011, the Departments of Labor and Education
launched the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career
Training (TAACCCT) program, a four-year, $2 billion funding program for
open educational resources to be released under CC-BY licenses.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/20/new-job-training-and-educationgrants-program-launched

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual
property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and
other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination of
peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded
scientific research? Conversely, are there policies that should not be
adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly
publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of
publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders?

The existing policy at the NIH uses a simple and elegant method to
provide public access without copyright infringement.  The policy
requires grantees publishing peer-reviewed articles arising from
NIH-funded research to retain the non-exclusive right to authorize NIH
to provide public access to the final version of their peer-reviewed
manuscript.  Hence, when grantees sign publication agreements, they may
not transfer the full bundle of copyrights to publishers, as they
formerly could.  They may transfer all the rights the journal needs to
publish the article, and more, but they may not transfer the right that
their prior funding agreement requires them to retain.  The result is
that publishers do not acquire the full copyright bundle.  Public access
through the NIH repository, PubMed Central, is authorized by the
authors, before they transfer rights to publishers, not by the
publishers, after acquiring rights from authors.  Public access is
authorized by the rights-holders.

Some publishers dislike the policy because they would like to acquire
the right that NIHfunded authors retain. But not even those publishers
believe that the policy infringes any rights that publishers acquire.
If they did, they would go to court.  Instead they have gone to the
legislature, and backed the so-called Fair Copyright in Research Works
Act (H.R. 6845 in the 110th Congress and H.R. 801 in the 111th
Congress), which would amend U.S. copyright law precisely to block the
NIH policy and to prevent other federal agencies from following its
lead.  This is an acknowledgment that the NIH policy is lawful under
current copyright law.

We ask the White House to use this sensible and effective method to
secure the rights needed to provide public access without infringement.
When disbursing public money for non-classified research, public funding
agencies should obtain the non-exclusive right to make the results
public.  Any alternative would leave authors subject to irresistible
pressure to transfer their rights to publishers, with the harmful effect
of transferring the public-access decision to publishers as well.  That
would undermine the public mission of our public funding agencies, and
put the interests of publishers ahead of every other stakeholder,
including researchers, research institutions, and everyone who depends
on the benefits of research from medical patients to technology
manufacturers and consumers.

Under the NIH policy, publishers retain the fundamental right to refuse
to publish any work for any reason, including NIH-funded work.  Whenever
they believe that the costs of publishing NIH-funded authors exceed the
benefits, they may refuse to publish those authors.  But to date, 100%
of surveyed publishers accommodate the NIH policy.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Publisher_policies_on_NIH-funded_authors

(3) What are the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized
approaches to managing public access to peer-reviewed scholarly
publications that result from federally funded research in terms of
interoperability, search, development of analytic tools, and other
scientific and commercial opportunities? Are there reasons why a Federal
agency (or agencies) should maintain custody of all published content,
and are there ways that the government can ensure long-term stewardship
if content is distributed across multiple private sources?

The NIH policy requires public access through a central repository,
PubMed Central.

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S.2695 in the 109th
Congress, S.1373 in the 111th Congress) would have provided more
flexibility.  Under FRPAA, federal funding agencies Agencies could host
their own public-access repositories, like PubMed Central, or they could
ask grantees to deposit their work in any public-access repository
meeting certain conditions of open access, interoperability, and
long-term preservation.  We support this flexibility.

FRPAA has not yet come to a vote.  But the Swedish Research Council
adopted a policy in October 2009 (taking effect in January 2010) with
FRPAA-like flexibility.  The SRC requires deposit in a public-access
repository, and specifically approves deposit in suitable institutional
repositories hosted by universities. The Irish Research Council for
Science, Engineering & Technology (IRCSET) open-access policy of May
2008 positively encouraged the use of institutional repositories ("[t]he
repository should ideally be a local institutional repository||), as did
the European Commission's open-access policy of August 2008 (grantees
should deposit their EC-funded work --into their institutional or if
unavailable a subject-based repository").  As far as we know, these
policies have been implemented without problems.
http://www.vr.se/inenglish/aboutus/policies/openaccess.4.44482f6612355bb5ee780003075.html
http://www.ircset.ie/tabid/142/tabid/102/default.aspx
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/08/548&form

We support centralized access in repositories like PubMed Central and
distributed access in suitable institutional repositories.  Both
solutions provide the important safeguard that the repositories are
independent of publishers who have an interesting in limiting access.

Public access through the web sites of private-sector publishers is very
welcome.  But it must not be the only source of public access to
publicly funded research.  The chief problem with publisher-hosted
public access is its uncertainty.  Public funding agencies like the NIH
are in a position to regulate grantees, not publishers.  Congress could
regulate publishers, but we believe that it should not do so, and should
steer clear of creating risks to the freedom and independence of the
press.  In the absence of the regulation of publishers, however, a
federal policy of publisher-hosted public access would inevitably fail
to achieve its own objectives.  Publishers may assert that they will
provide public access.  However, their willingness and ability to
provide public access would always be contingent and beyond the proper
reach of federal power.  Because we can achieve assured public access by
revising federal funding contracts, or regulating federal grantees,
there is no need to depend on uncertain (late, temporary, selective, and
unenforceable) public access from publishers.

(4) Are there models or new ideas for public-private partnerships that
take advantage of existing publisher archives and encourage innovation
in accessibility and interoperability, while ensuring long-term
stewardship of the results of federally funded research?

A reasonable public-access policy could provide that copies of
peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly funded research be jointly
hosted by federal agencies and privatesector publishers.  However, for
the reasons spelled out in response to Question 3, public access should
never be available solely through private-sector publishers.  There are
good reasons to require public access, and not merely encourage it, and
there are good reasons for the federal government not to require
affirmative acts from private-sector publishers.  Moreover, there are
good reasons to think that in the absence of legal obligations, public
access from publishers would be variable and uncertain, undermining the
fundamental rationale for a public-access policy.

Publishers have an understandable interest in traffic and download data
from the repositories providing access publicly funded research.  But
that doesn't mean that publishers must be the sole hosts of those
repositories.  If those repositories are hosted by federal agencies (as
the NIH hosts PubMed Central) or by the institutions employing the
individual authors (as Harvard hosts DASH, or its Digital Access to
Scholarship at Harvard repository), federal policy could require
repositories to share traffic and download data with publishers.

(5) What steps can be taken by Federal agencies, publishers, and/or
scholarly and professional societies to encourage interoperable search,
discovery, and analysis capacity across disciplines and archives? What
are the minimum core metadata for scholarly publications that must be
made available to the public to allow such capabilities? How should
Federal agencies make certain that such minimum core metadata associated
with peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded
scientific research are publicly available to ensure that these
publications can be easily found and linked to Federal science funding?

We would like to see the repositories hosting publicly funded research
comply with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and eventually with its strengthened successor,
the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE).  We
regard the open licenses recommended in response to Question 1 to be a
kind of metadata, and would like to see them required for all articles
arising from publicly funded research.

But we are not prepared to list all the standards with which publicly
funded research results ought to comply.  On the contrary, we believe
that they cannot all be specified in advance and should be allowed to
evolve.  One reason is that some promising standards are still emerging,
such as Activity data to Enhance and Increase Open-access Usage (AEIOU),
Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER), Open
Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), and Publisher and Institutional
Repository Usage Statistics (PIRUS).  Public access is urgently needed
for research and the economy, and cannot wait for all the relevant
standards to emerge.

(6) How can Federal agencies that fund science maximize the benefit of
public access policies to U.S. taxpayers, and their investment in the
peer-reviewed literature, while minimizing burden and costs for
stakeholders, including awardee institutions, scientists, publishers,
Federal agencies, and libraries?

To reduce the burden on awardee institutions, different federal funding
agencies should adopt uniform public-access policies.  Uniformity will
not only reduce the burden on institutions, but increase compliance and
potentially reduce costs.

We support the approach taken in the Federal Research Public Access Act
(FRPAA, see citations in response to Question 3).  FRPAA requires
different agencies to develop their own public-access policies within
the general framework laid down in the bill.

Universities support the FRPAA approach.  When FRPAA was re-introduced
in 2009, it was publicly endorsed by the presidents or provosts of 120
U.S. institutions of higher education.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/institutions.shtml

Similarly, in the last White House consultation on public-access
policies (December 2009 - January 2010), when the question was whether
to extend the NIH policy across the federal government, and hence to
impose that kind of uniformity across the federal government, the
suggestion received overwhelming public support.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/08/public-access-policy-update

(7) Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of
peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research,
such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these
public access policies?

We could support mandatory public access for any work which arises from
publicly funded research, is voluntarily published or presented by the
author, generates no royalties for the author, and is not classified.

This would cover many peer-reviewed journal articles (or author
manuscripts), book chapters, books, conference proceedings, theses and
dissertations, and open educational resources.

However, we think these are secondary issues and must not delay a policy
to require public access to peer-reviewed journal articles (or author
manuscripts) arising from publicly funded research.

We are not prepared to list all the types of content to which a federal
public-access policy ought to apply.  One reason to proceed with
peer-reviewed journal articles first and consider other categories later
is that there may be good reasons for a public-access policy to treat
different categories of content differently, just as the White House, in
the present RFIs, treats publications differently from data.  Another
reason --as in our response to Question 5-- is that public access to
research articles is urgently needed and cannot wait for the policy
nuances for other categories to be hammered out.

(8) What is the appropriate embargo period after publication before the
public is granted free access to the full content of peer-reviewed
scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research? Please
describe the empirical basis for the recommended embargo period.
Analyses that weigh public and private benefits and account for external
market factors, such as competition, price changes, library budgets, and
other factors, will be particularly useful. Are there evidence-based
arguments that can be made that the delay period should be different for
specific disciplines or types of publications?

Embargoes limit the utility of research both for researchers and for
businesses.  Embargoes therefore limit the return on the public's
investment in research, and compromise the public interest.  They may be
justified, but only in the ways that compromises may be justified.

Embargoes should be as short as possible.  If federal policy initially
allows embargoes, then it should reduce their maximum permissible length
over time, eventually to zero.  We could support a plan to do this
gradually rather than suddenly in order give publishers time to prepare.

A zero-embargo policy would not force premature disclosure of patentable
discoveries, since the policy would only apply to work that authors
voluntarily decide to publish. If publicly funded researchers make a
patentable discovery, and wish to apply for a patent before publishing,
the public-access policy would only kick in at the time of publication.

If government policy is to allow embargoes, even temporarily, it might
allow different embargoes in different fields, on the ground that the
demand for articles seems to drop off at different rates in different
fields.  However, we have not seen good data on these different rates of
demand decay.  Publishers have this data, and if they wish to support
differential embargo periods, they should provide data to justify them.
In any case, variable embargo periods would burden universities by
making compliance with an agency in one field different from compliance
with an agency in another field (in tension with Question #6 above).

Similarly, if publishers believe that short embargo periods would harm
them, they should release data showing it.  Researchers, research
institutions, and taxpayers cannot be expected to prove the negative, or
to prove the harmlessness of short embargoes.  Until there is data to
show harm, we must act in the public interest and provide early or
immediate public access to publicly funded research.  If publishers
provide data showing substantive harm, then it may become appropriate to
consider what kind of compromise with the public interest might be
justified.

Finally, we should not use the NIH policy as a model on this issue.  The
NIH policy allows an embargo period of up to 12 months.  But while that
makes it a conspicuous precedent in the U.S., it is the exception
worldwide, not the norm.  Even in its own field of biomedicine, it is an
outlier.  Every other biomedical funding agency in the world with a
public-access mandate caps the maximum permissible embargo at six
months:  the Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), British Heart Foundation,
Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, Canadian Health Services
Research Foundation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Dunhill
Medical Trust (UK), European Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Chief
Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, Department
of Health (UK), Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (Canada), Fund
to Promote Scientific Research (Austria), Genome Canada, Heart and
Stroke Foundation of Canada, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Joint
Information Systems Committee (UK), Michael Smith Foundation for Health
Research (Canada), National Cancer Institute of Canada, National
Institute for Health Research (UK), Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research
Council, Sweden), and the Wellcome Trust (UK).