[Insight-users] INFORMATION SHARING: Europe Steps Into the Open With Plans for Electronic Archives -- Vogel and Enserink 308 (5722): 623 -- Science

[Luis Ibanez]

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5722/623>

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INFORMATION SHARING:
Europe Steps Into the Open With Plans for Electronic Archives
Gretchen Vogel and Martin Enserink

In a flurry of new proposals, institutes and funding agencies are laying
the groundwork for the free release of peer-reviewed papers

BERLIN AND PARIS--While moves in the United States to make scientific
research results available--for free--at the click of a mouse have
generated intense debate, European research organizations have quietly
been forging ahead. Slowly but surely, they are starting to build and
connect institutional and even nationwide public archives that will,
according to proponents, be the megalibraries of the future, allowing
anyone with an Internet connection to access papers that result from
publicly funded research. "The cutting edge of the Open Access movement
is now in Europe," says Peter Suber of Public Knowledge, an advocacy
group in Washington, D.C.

Institutes in Europe don't feel the intense heat from patient
organizations, which helped drive the free-access movement in the United
States. But many agree with its philosophy. Some say open archives offer
research managers and funders a way to monitor scientific output; they
can also increase access to dissertations, reports, and other "gray
literature" that doesn't make it into journals. In many cases, they are
out ahead of their own researchers, who, far from clamoring for open
access, tend to ignore such archives unless they are required to deposit
their own papers.

London's Wellcome Trust, for example, has taken one of the strongest
public-access positions worldwide. The U.K.'s largest funder of
biomedical research is planning to launch a system that will archive all
papers produced by its grantees. Wellcome will require researchers to
deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript within 6 months of
publication. That goes much further than the U.S. National Institutes of
Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, which decided to "strongly
encourage," but not require, grant recipients to post their papers in
the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central within 12 months
of publication--a policy that has drawn heated opposition from some
scientific societies and publishers who fear it will put some journals
out of business (Science, 11 February, p. 825).

In the coming weeks, Wellcome plans to issue a call for applications to
host the archive, which will be connected to PubMed Central. "We will be
providing a door in England to the worldwide library," says Robert
Terry, a senior policy adviser at the trust. Although the data behind
the screen will be the same, the U.K. site will be tailored to U.K.
users, he says, providing links to grant numbers so that
users--especially funders--can track specific projects. To nudge
researchers along, Terry says, the trust may consider an applicant's
depositing record in decisions on future grants. Wellcome hopes to
identify a host by early fall and have the database up and running early
next year.

The U.K. Medical Research Council (MRC), the Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council, the Department of Health, Cancer
Research UK, and the British Heart Foundation are considering joining
the project, which based on NIH's figures will likely cost at least $1.5
million. "We are certainly very interested in what Wellcome is doing,"
says Anthony Peatfield of the MRC. The seven U.K. Research Councils plan
to announce their own public-access policy next month, which is expected
to ask grant recipients to deposit their papers in an archive maintained
either by their own institution or, if available, a centralized one like
U.K. PubMed Central.

Similar projects are under way in France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The continent's open-access advocates got a boost in October 2003, when
members of several of Europe's leading scientific organizations signed
the so-called Berlin Declaration. It says that authors should retain
rights to their papers--including the right to distribute electronic
copies freely--and that all papers should be deposited in a public
archive "maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society,
government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to
enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and
long-term archiving." So far, 56 organizations from 17 countries have
signed the declaration, and many are starting to put it into practice.
Publishers are concerned, says Sally Morris, executive director of the
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, based in
Clapham, U.K. For smaller journals in slower moving fields, free access,
even with a 12-month delay, "could mean serious loss of subscriptions
and journals collapsing," she says. "The potential to destroy the
journals that the open-access movement is parasitizing is very real indeed."

In France, the government's four major research institutes--which
together spend some €3.5 billion on research annually--6 weeks ago
jointly declared their intention to move toward open archives. Furthest
along is the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), which plans
to expand an archive for physics and math papers that it has operated
for 4 years. Eventually, the quartet may create a common database and a
Web portal that archives as much of French research as possible, says
Odile Hologne of the National Institute of Agricultural Research.

Ideally, the full text of all published papers would be archived, says
Christian Bréchot, director-general of the Institute for Health and
Medical Research (INSERM). But INSERM doesn't plan to force researchers
to publish only in journals that accept this, Bréchot says, so for the
time being, there will be gaps. "We have to be realistic," he says.

Meanwhile, all 13 universities in the Netherlands have joined with the
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), a major science
funder, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
Royal Library to develop a network of databases called Digital Academic
Repositories (DARE). Whether or not researchers will be obliged to
participate is for each institute to decide, says program manager Leo
Waaijers. But to pique interest and get the ball rolling, DARE will
showcase the works of some 200 of the country's top scientists next
month in a project dubbed "Cream of Science." Unlike the British
agencies, however, NWO has no plans to use its muscle to enforce
participation.

The German national science funding organization, the DFG, is also a
signatory to the Berlin Declaration. It covers researchers' expenses if
they want to submit to open-access journals that require a publication
fee. Spokesperson Eva-Maria Streier says the organization is considering
strengthening its position by adding a clause to its grants that would
require researchers to deposit papers in an institutional archive within
a year of publication.

The experience of Germany's Max Planck Society, which took a lead role
in drafting the Berlin Declaration and hosted the meeting where it was
launched, highlights a few potential pitfalls. The organization has
built a pilot archive, called eDoc, available to all Max Planck
researchers. But participation is voluntary--and far from complete.
Indeed, the Max Planck's independent structure prohibits the society
from requiring its researchers to archive their work. In addition, Max
Planck officials have found that their historians, lawyers, biologists,
and physicists have very different ideas about open access.

Indeed, leaders of several open-access initiatives note that their
biggest challenge is not publishers' restrictions on copyright but
researchers' inertia. Different tactics are being considered to overcome
it. Terry says he hopes the Wellcome Trust's moves will help change
that. "I describe it as passive resistance," he says. He points to a
study by the U.K.'s Joint Information Systems Committee that showed
nearly 80% of scientists said they would deposit their papers in an
archive if their funder required it. Only 5% said they would refuse. In
France, researchers may be compelled to join by making only papers
deposited in open archives count during their periodic evaluations, says
CNRS's Laurent Romary. Kurt Melhorn of the Max Planck Institute for
Informatics in Saarbrücken and a leader of the eDoc project, says he
hopes peer pressure will eventually do the trick: "It's a question of
critical mass."