[Insight-users] University Public-Access Mandates Are Good for Science

[Luis Ibanez]

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000237

by David Shulenburger
Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities,
Washington, D.C., United States of America


<quote>

Why would university faculty choose to place their scholarship on
electronic archives for a world-wide audience? Many US universities
have adopted such mandates for public access to faculty research,
perhaps most notably Harvard [1], MIT, and the University of Kansas
[2]. These policies (and many more like them in various stages of
consideration on campuses across the nation and world) are harbingers
of a new order, one in which essentially all scholarly articles can be
found and accessed by any interested individual.


This spring,

* The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities,
* The Association of American Universities,
* The Association of Research Libraries, and
* The Coalition for Networked Information

sent a document entitled “The Research University's Role in the
Dissemination of Research and Scholarship,” [3] to all public and
private US research universities, requesting that serious campus
discussion on the topic occur. The document resulted from a roundtable
of officers of the four associations and 21 provosts, research
officers and librarians, and university press representatives, invited
from their member universities. There is much to be gained by
enlarging the universe of those who have full access to scholarship.
Ubiquitous campus public-access deposit mandates will rapidly generate
this gain."


Ending the Age of Disorder

The last 25 years have been an age of disorder, not an unusual
beginning for a revolution. Stewart Brand's declaration at the dawn of
the digital age that “1information wants to be free” foretold the
porous electronic world that scholarship has come to inhabit. In the
25 years since Brand uttered those words, scholarly works have grown
increasingly free. That which, prior to the digital age, could be
found only within the covers of the scholarly journal, first emerged
from those covers as electronic replacements for working papers.
Unlike the mimeographed and later photocopied versions of papers, the
new electronic versions could be circulated without cost and, even
after hundreds of reproductions, remain readable.

....

While serving as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
Elias Zerhouni observed that “we have no one place where the
integration of the information can be used as a powerful hypothesis
generator” [7]. He set about to produce the desired order by
continuing the work begun by his predecessor at NIH, Harold Varmus,
building PubMed Central as a partial solution for the biomedical
sciences. It has become a large, though not complete, corpus of the
biosciences/biomedical literature. It will be more complete in the
future because articles arising from NIH grants accepted for
publication after April 7, 2008, must be deposited in PubMed Central.

.....

The most effective method of ensuring that the majority of important
work is available is by replicating across the academy university
public-access mandates like those of Harvard, MIT, and Kansas
throughout the world. Most works originate with university-affiliated
faculty or have co-authors who are faculty members. Deposit of
articles in the form in which they were published in a journal
requires permission of journals that require that authors provide
exclusive copyright to them. In the Harvard policy, the faculty member
grants a “nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid up, world-wide license to
exercise any and all rights under copyright” to Harvard College [8].
While these provisions can be waived by the Dean in exceptional
circumstances, the language sends a strong message to the journal that
if it wishes to publish papers of the Harvard faculty, it will not
object to inclusion of the articles in Harvard's repository. The MIT
and Kansas policies have like provisions. When complemented by funding
agency and foundation public-access mandates that capture the work
originating with industry and government researchers who may not have
faculty status, university mandates will, in time, produce nearly
universal access to all the scientific literature.

.....

Journals opposing open access often claim that it will take away the
funding needed for the refereeing process. Clearly the refereeing
process must be supported. I know of no rigorous evidence that even
very brief embargo periods before making articles publicly available
cause scientific journal subscriptions to decline; therefore, I
believe that public access has little impact on subscription revenue
and is thus fully consistent with ensuring that refereeing of the
literature continues.

An explicit tradeoff between having access to all scholarly journal
articles after no more than one year's delay is preferable to running
even a small risk that immediate access would damage the refereeing
process. In the long run, it will be incumbent on any journal
insisting that access be delayed to produce evidence that the harm
done to science by delayed access is less than the harm that would be
done to science if immediate access were provided. As more and more
scholarly journals change their practices and permit immediate posting
on publicly accessible Web sites, it will be increasingly difficult to
defend the position that short embargo periods cause harm to journals.

.....

The future of all libraries is digital. Most collection access is now
through electronic means. To argue that maintaining a digital archive
of faculty scholarly articles will be too expensive is essentially to
argue that the university will be unable to maintain a viable library
resource in the future.

.....

Your Opportunity and Responsibility Top

As a careful observer of scholarly communications, I'm convinced that
the public goods aspect of faculty research will ultimately compel
public access to it. Public goods have the characteristic that use of
them by one individual does not diminish their value to others. In
fact, the knowledge presented through scholarship generally becomes
more valuable as it is shared more widely and becomes a building block
upon which further scientific advances may occur.

Faculty members can accelerate the process. We can persuade colleagues
on our own campuses to pass public-access mandates like those at
Harvard, MIT, and Kansas. We can speed up what otherwise might be a
20-year process and make it happen in three or four. We can urge
Congress to expand the NIH mandate to all federal funding agencies
[10]. We can convince the less-enlightened scholarly societies that
representing our disciplines means working for public access to
scholarship rather than opposing it.

It is impossible to know how much more rapidly scientific progress
will occur if all the scholarly literature becomes accessible. What we
each know is the frustrations we've experienced in our own research
because of access difficulties. It is within the power of the
university faculty in this country to remove these roadblocks.
Supporting adoption of a public-access deposit mandate on your campus
is an effort most worthy of the involvement of dedicated scientists.

</quote>

Full paper at:
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000237