From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:41:57 -0500

I was one of nine other university press directors joining Mike
Rossner in dissenting from the AAUP (and AAP) support of the Conyers
bill opposing the NIH policy back in 2009:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/04/open.  I also drafted
the Statement on Open Access for the AAUP during my presidency in
2007/8 that was aimed at extending the discussion of open access from
STM journals to books. As director of Penn State Press, I helped
launch the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing jointly with the
Penn State Libraries, which supported a number of OA initiatives,
including a monograph series in Romance studies.

I do have some concerns about FRPPA, however, especially its
insistence on a 6-month embargo applying to all fields. Although the
NEH does not have a large enough external research budget for it to be
covered by FRPPA, and hence the humanities would largely not be
affected, the NSF does, and it funds a significant amount of research
in the social sciences. I am not sure a 6-month embargo period is
enough to protect the investment of publishers in social science
journals, although some large publishers in that sector, like Sage,
are now moving in the direction of open access, through its Sage Open,
which is modeled on PLoS ONE:
http://www.sagepub.com/sageopen/landing.sp.  (It should be noted that
the Research Councils UK have recently made a proposal similar to
FRPPA that does include the humanities within its compass and
recommends a 12-month embargo for both humanities and social sciences,
though only provisionally with the aim ultimately of reducing that
period to 6 months--or to zero:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/22/british-publishers-object-open-access-proposals.)

But I also have deeper concerns about whether FRPPA (as well as the
NIH policy that it aspires to extend and modify) really represents the
optimal approach for achieving the objective of serving the best
interests of the taxpaying public. As I have reflected about this
issue more, I have come to question whether a policy that assumes the
primacy of traditional academic peer review as a sina qua non for
public benefit and that imposes a delay of 12 (or even 6) months after
publication (which itself involves months of processing) is the best
approach for enhancing the utility of government-funded research.

Traditional peer review involves types of assessment that are central
to the academic enterprise but not necessarily crucial for public
policy more broadly. E.g., a typical question asked of an expert
reviewer is to compare the research with other relevant research and
evaluate its contribution as an advance in scholarship in its field.
The taxpaying public in general is not much interested in the answers
to these questions. People are more concerned that the research
reported is accurate and reliable and the results arrived at by
application of a sound methodology. This kind of narrower assessment
is that which has been pioneered by PLoS ONE.

What FRPPA mandates, following the NIH, is the posting of the version
of the article as revised by the author after peer review, but not the
version of record, which is the final version as published by the
publisher, after important processing that includes copyediting. This
version may be satisfactory for certain purposes, such as conveying
basic information, but is not usually satisfactory for citing in
subsequent scholarly research. And it is posted only after a
substantial delay of many months.

In my opinion, a more optimal approach would be for each agency to
enforce the already existing requirement for each funded researcher to
submit a final report about the results of the research undertaken,
which the agency could then review (in the PLoS ONE manner) quickly
and post after only a short delay following submission. This would be
the "version of record" for that report, which could be safely cited
by subsequent researchers, who would not have to chase down a more
authoritative version elsewhere.  The taxpaying public would be well
served by having this research made available in the most timely
manner possible and in a final form suitable for citation.

In all the debate surrounding the NIH policy and now FRPPA, this kind
of alternative has not received much attention. There seems to be an
implicit assumption that traditional peer review is somehow necessary
to serve the public interest, even when that kind of peer review is
now under close scrutiny in the academy itself as possibly not the
most suitable for research in the digital age, with experiments in
post-publication peer review under way in a number of sectors of
academe.

Rather than rush through a piece of legislation that may only
partially serve the aims of open access, I would hope that more
discussion of these kinds of issues could be engaged before the votes
in congress are counted.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Mike Rossner <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:32:38 -0400
>
> For the reference of Liblicense readers, the following letter was just
> sent to all Rockefeller University Press subscribers:
>
> Dear Librarian,
>
> I am writing to clarify the position of The Rockefeller University
> Press (RUP) on various legislative efforts regarding public access to
> publications resulting from federally funded research.  RUP is a
> member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the
> Association of American University Presses (AAUP), who have both
> recently provided position statements on this issue.  However, RUP
> does not agree with those statements.
>
> RUP is a subscription-based publisher that publishes three biomedical
> research journals: The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of
> Experimental Medicine, and The Journal of General Physiology.  We have
> released our back content to the public since 2001 - long before any
> federal mandates existed - because we believe we have an obligation to
> give something back to the public that funds the research we publish.
>
> The AAP supported the now-defunct Research Works Act.  RUP strongly
> opposed that act.
>
> Both the AAP and AAUP have opposed the Federal Research Public Access
> Act (FRPAA), which has been re-introduced into both the House and
> Senate. Although numerous non-profit publishers signed the AAP letter,
> the RUP does not stand with those publishers.  RUP supports FRPAA in
> principle.  We know from the NIH public access policy that mandated
> access to the results of federally-funded research is necessary to get
> certain publishers to release this content to the public, and we
> support legislation to extend the NIH policy to other large federal
> funding agencies.
>
> The AAP and AAUP use a one-size-does-not-fit-all argument to oppose
> FRPAA because the drafted legislation calls for all large federal
> agencies to mandate public access six months after publication.
> Although it can be argued that a six-month embargo period may not be
> suitable for all disciplines covered by FRPAA, this is not grounds to
> oppose the legislation altogether.  It should be supported in
> principle and could be modified during Congressional review to provide
> the flexibility for each agency to choose its own embargo period.
>
> The continuing rhetoric from the AAP and AAUP about having ongoing
> "conversations" about access to the results of publicly funded
> research is outdated.  There is legislation on the table that will
> help to make public access a reality now.
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> Mike Rossner
> Executive Director
>
> These comments are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily
> reflect the position of The Rockefeller University.