RE: Sabo Bill: Measure Calls for Wider Access to Federally

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Financed Research 
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
X-edited-by: aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu
Date: Thu,  3 Jul 2003 00:03:07 EDT
Reply-To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.2 -- ListProc(tm) by CREN
Precedence: bulk

[Jan Velterop wrote:]

"The Sabo bill will encourage publishers to start providing that choice.  
After all, the option of selling access will not be available to them
(what's there to sell?) for federally funded research results. Authors, if
they want to be funded by public money, will have to make their results
freely available and so are encouraged to make the choice for open access
if that choice is there."

Phil Davis responds:

I'm not sure there needs to be the dichotomy between open-access and 
subscription-access as you set up.  As the original Public Library of 
Science proposed, open access to research would be available after 6 
months.  See <http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml>.  This would 
still enable publishers to make money on the value-added services they 
provide but still allow eventual open-access to the public.  Many society 
publishers have already adopted this practice, see 

<http://www.highwire.org/lists/freeart.dtl>

and libraries have confirmed that they are still willing to pay for the
immediacy of good information.  Commercial publishers, however, have been
very reticent to adopt this practice, undoubtedly because it would result
in a massive correction in the prices they would be able to charge.

I don't think it is necessary to paint an all-or nothing choice here.  I
believe there is already a very good compromise that is in the better
interest of science and the public.  Unfortunately, it may not be in the
best interest of for-profit publishers.

Phil Davis, Cornell University

At 11:10 PM 7/1/2003 -0400, you wrote:

>The bill will not, by itself, provide or assure open access to published
>research results. It will, however, quite possibly create a climate in
>which open access is widely recognised as a societal benefit, indeed an
>imperative for publicly funded research, and so help authors make
>appropriate choices when deciding where to submit their papers.
>
>An important point will be the bill's enforcement. If I understand it
>correctly, even now, if research is federally funded in full, the
>written-up results cannot be copyrighted in the US. So theoretically, they
>should be in the public domain. But are they freely available? If they
>are, I'd like to know where.
>
>An extremely helpful aspect of the so-called Bethesda Principles, which
>are being developed by a group of prominent funding bodies (see
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm), is the concept that open
>access is a property of an article, *not* of a journal or a publisher.
>This makes it possible for traditional publishers to make the transition
>to open access publishing models by offering authors the choice: pay and
>your article will be open access; or don't pay and we'll have to recoup
>the costs by selling access rights (via subscriptions or licences) and
>thereby restrict dissemination to those who have the means to buy access.
>
>The Sabo bill will encourage publishers to start providing that choice.
>After all, the option of selling access will not be available to them
>(what's there to sell?) for federally funded research results. Authors, if
>they want to be funded by public money, will have to make their results
>freely available and so are encouraged to make the choice for open access
>if that choice is there.
>
>At least one journal I know of, Physiological Genomics
>(www.physiolgenomics.org) has already announced making that choice
>available to authors. Rumour has it that other, important, journals will
>be following suit, such as the EMBO Journal. Perhaps the Nature Publishing
>Group who is to take over that journal in January 2004 can confirm this?
>
>Jan Velterop
>BioMed Central
>The Open Access Publishers
>www.biomedcentral.com