SUPPORTING THE NIH PROPOSAL:
25 Noble Laureates Write Letter to Congress
“Dear Members of Congress:
As scientists and Nobel laureates, we are writing today to express our strong support for the House Appropriations Committee’s recent direction to NIH to develop an open, taxpayer access policy requiring that a complete electronic text of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be supplied to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. We believe the time is now for all Members of Congress to support this enlightened policy.”
Read more: http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2004/08/nobel082604.pdf
Statement from the National Academy of Sciences:
“The Council of the National Academy of Sciences endorses the proposed National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy that research supported by NIH will be made freely available online at PubMed Central (PMC) not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The benefits of this policy to science worldwide and to the general public seem to us to be significant.
This policy is a reasonable approach for sustaining subscription revenue, and a number of leading journals already follow it, including the flagship journal of the Academy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS). In addition, PNAS is among an increasing number of journals that permit authors to pay extra fees to make their papers available online immediately — rather than in six months — and we hope that NIH will enable authors to take advantage of this option by authorizing the use of grant funds for this service.”
Read more: http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/s09162004?OpenDocument
Letter to the Office of Management and Budget from Bruce Alberts, President of NAS includes Comments and Suggestions: http://www4.nas.edu/nas/nashome.nsf/Multi+Database+Search/
1E09C6380F32E0138525674E007998FD?OpenDocument
Taxpayer Support Open Access to NIH Research
Washington , DC (August 24, 2004) – An unprecedented coalition of public interest groups today announced the formation of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. The Alliance will urge the National Institutes of Health as well as Congress to ensure that peer-reviewed articles on taxpayer-funded research at NIH become fully accessible and available on line and at no extra cost to the American public.
The Alliance is an informal coalition of libraries, patient and health policy advocates, and other stakeholders who support reforms that will make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public.
Details and FAQ’s on the Alliance may be found at <www.taxpayeraccess.org>.
Members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/member.html
Libraries and Others Line up to Support the NIH
While publishers united on the opposite side, a group of academic libraries and major library organizations joined a coalition to support open access to NIH-funded research. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) is comprised of libraries, patient and health policy advocates, and others who will urge the NIH and Congress to move forward with plans to make the NIH’s publicly-funded research freely accessible online. The coalition includes the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the American Library Association (ALA), Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL), Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), Medical Library Association (MLA), and SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an initiative of the Association of Research libraries, which has been an early and vocal booster of the NIH proposal. The coalition also includes individual libraries, including those at Boston College, Colorado State, and the University of Connecticut. From the outset, librarians have questioned publishers’ strong opposition to the NIH proposal, which SPARC director Rick Johnson has characterized as a reasonable proposal. In announcing their participation in ATA, John Burger, ASERL executive director, said that the NIH proposal would not change the traditional peer review and scholarly publishing process. "It simply ensures free public access to the archives of previously reported information that was funded by the American public." said Burger. "It’s clearly the right thing to do."
[Library Journal Academic News Wire: August 26, 2004]
Medical Library Association’s Letter to NIH Director Zerhouni
“The Medical Library Association (MLA) supports the recommendation of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee that the NIH provide free public access to articles resulting from NIH-funded research. MLA has always advocated that information generated by public funds is a vital national resource, and that all Americans have the right to have access to this information developed from their tax dollars.” Read more: http://www.mlanet.org/government/gov_pdf/zerhouni_20040730.pdf
AGAINST THE NIH PROPOSAL:
Letter to Congress from Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB):
"Dear Senators Specter and Harkin:
I am writing to request your help in a matter of utmost concern to the scientific community. Report language accompanying the FY 2005 appropriations bill marked up by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to implement a specific policy for electronic dissemination of NIH-funded research. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), representing 22 societies and over 65,000 scientists, strongly objects to this proposal, and we have been contacted by more than a dozen other organizations representing patients, scientists, and publishers with similar concerns.”
Read more: http://www.faseb.org/opa/news/docs/Specter_Harkin_Letter_8×19x4.pdf
AAP Members Outline Their Objections to the Proposal
In a letter urging consultation with publishers, three members of the AAP’s Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division outlined their objections to the NIH’s proposal. The authors–Wiley’s Brian Crawford, the American Institute of Physics’ Marc Brodsky, and the American Physiological Society’s Martin Frank–issued nine major points. They range from outright objections–including an objection to "government intervention" in scientific publishing and an objection to "a mandated central government-run repository"–to major concerns over how the policy might shape the current scholarly publishing landscape. "That such a move might be taken by the U.S. government or one of its agencies, acting without any justification via evidentiary findings," reads the letter, "is alarming and without precedent in our industry. It is a clear instance of government interference with the interests of free enterprise." The policy under consideration, they further argue, risks "diminishing, not enhancing," the value that NIH-sponsored research now delivers to society.
Taking aim on open access, the authors posit that the "author pays" model of open access publishing has "critical shortcomings, and has not yet been proven to be acceptable to the majority of scientific authors." They further complain that forcing authors to deposit into PubMed Central the final, accepted versions of their articles–but not the final published article–could compromise the scientific record. "The ability to distinguish among versions could be compromised or lost, article content could be modified inappropriately, and inaccurate medical information might be disseminated in error," they write. While the letter raises tough questions and legitimate concerns about how the NIH policy would function practically, including a concern over whether the policy would be an "unfunded mandate" or whether Congress would make funds available to ensure compliance, it also attacks the NIH’s core argument: that taxpayers should have access to taxpayer-funded funded research. "Many professional and scholarly publishers have U.S.-based operations, and are both employers and taxpayers," the authors posit. "They have made sustained investments in technology and added-value features to build their assets. At what economic detriment to them–and further cost to U.S. taxpayers–would your plan be accomplished?" While they readily acknowledge the need "for standards to assure the digital archival preservation of NIH-funded research reports," they deny any further role for the agency.
[Library Journal Academic News Wire: August 26, 2004]
