AAP/PSP Open letter to Dr. Zerhouni (NIH)

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

This letter has been circulated widely to journalists; of possible
interest to this list.  

Because liblicense-l's policy is to limit messages to a reasonable length
(moderator's judgment), we herein reproduce excerpts, with the deleted
sections marked by ellipses (...).  The key points of the letter have been 
retained.

___


August 23, 2004

Elias Zerhouni, MD
Director
The National Institutes of Health
9000 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20892

. . . 

We understand your forthcoming policy to be driven by two motivations: 1)  
that the NIH itself should have an easy means to identify publications
that result from NIH-funded research, and 2) that US taxpayers should have
access to the results of government funded work. The solution you seem to
favor is the establishment of PubMedCentral as a central institutional
repository at the National Library of Medicine, with mandated deposit
(presumably incumbent upon NIH grantee authors themselves) upon acceptance
of their manuscripts for publication after journal peer review.  
PubMedCentral would undertake to manage the process of manuscript deposit
and hosting (presumably including any standardized formatting and tagging
to enable search and retrieval) and would make deposited versions of the
manuscripts openly available via the internet, either at a specified
interval after journal publication (e.g. a timeframe as short as 6 months)  
or immediately upon deposit in those instances where journal publication
charges are paid by authors who have NIH grant funds. It is our
understanding that the policy you are contemplating would continue to
allow (non-US government employee) authors to assign copyright in their
work to publishers.

We wish to arrange for a small delegation of our representatives to meet
with you at the earliest opportunity, so that we may pursue the following
concerns we share. There are other operational and practical issues that
we sensed the NIH has not yet considered, that we feel also warrant
careful discussion in advance of your issuing any policy recommendations
for public comment.

1. We object to the notion that government intervention in scientific
publishing is warranted, and believe that any policy that would mandate
the deposition of scientific publications into a central,
government-operated repository to be an inappropriate intrusion on the
legitimate business interests of the private sector.  . . .

2. Alternatives to a mandated central government-run repository should be
considered. . . .

3. Requiring NIH-funded authors to deposit their accepted manuscripts in a
central repository also has the potential to compromise the integrity of
the scientific record. . . .

4. We challenge the premise that because US taxpayers fund research, then
the articles that result from all such funded studies, publishable only
after the painstaking and costly process of peer review, should be made
openly available by a US government agency to the world as a public good.
. . .

5. The policy that NIH is contemplating has the potential to force
publishers away from a subscription-based publishing model to an
author-pays model of open access--thus far a monolithic and unproven
economic model of publishing. In putting its "thumb on the scale" in this
way, the government would be introducing bias into scientific publishing
and would risk diminishing, not enhancing, the value that NIH-sponsored
biomedical research now delivers to society.  . . .

6. Publishers stand ready to work with the NIH and relevant patient
organizations to explore new ways to enable consumer access to technical
information presented in the right context, and to measure its
effectiveness.  Furthermore, the assertion that access to the medical
literature is unduly restricted is a red herring. . . .

7. We urge you to work with the biomedical publishing community on
experiments and more systematic analyses, with the shared goal of
providing selective, evidence-based information access solutions that can
truly improve healthcare delivery and outcomes. This approach is
preferable to the NIH unilaterally mandating a "one size fits all" policy
for immediate or 6-month delayed public access to all original research
studies supported by NIH-funds. . . .

8. We wish to clarify whether your policy will be an "unfunded mandate" or
will carry with it additional funding to support scientific communication.
. . .

9.  We would welcome a dialog with the NIH regarding the governance and
ongoing operation of PubMedCentral , which to date has essentially served
as a full-text repository for the selected benefit of only those
publishers willing to make their content freely available via open access.  
. . .

As you assess the concerns we have raised above, we share also a comment
from Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, taken from a personal
communication:

"Open access (to the knowledge of the great nineteenth-century teachers of
medicine and surgery, for which they charged students vast amounts of
money to hear) was the very reason why Thomas Wakley launched the The
Lancet in 1823 - but at a small cost to the user.  As a physician and
editor, I want to see stronger medical and research cultures within our
society.  For all those who take part in the debate about open access, I
would urge that they answer this one question: what is the system of
publication that best serves the person on whom the entire edifice of
medical publishing depends - the patient? The sum total of the responses
will, I suspect, give a complex picture, one that is unlikely to fully
support either user-pays or author-pays models.  But the debate will force
important further questions about the assumptions on which all models are
based.  Existing user-pays approaches have critical benefits to both
science and society."

We would welcome the opportunity for an ongoing dialog to discuss these
important and complex public policy issues with you and your colleagues
from the NIH as you formulate your draft publishing policy. We will be in
touch with your office to request a time for a delegation of our
representatives to meet with you.

Sincerely,
        
Marc Brodsky, Ph.D.					
Chair, Executive Council, AAP/PSP	
CEO and Executive Director
The American Institute of Physics
One Physics Ellipse 
College Park, MD 20740 
Email: brodsky@aip.org
Phone: 301.209.3131



Brian D. Crawford, Ph.D.
Vice-Chair, Executive Council, AAP/PSP and
President, American Medical Publishers Association (AMPA)
Vice-President and STM Publishing Director
Global Life and Medical Sciences
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street, 8-02
Hoboken, NJ 07030
Email:  Brian.Crawford@wiley.com
Phone: 201.748.8810



Martin Frank, Ph.D.
Coordinator, DC Principles Coalition
Executive Director, American Physiological Society
9650 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20814
Email: mfrank@the-aps.org
Phone: 301.634.7118