Petition to White House crucial for fair research access

Correction: The original version of this article contained an error. The National Science Foundation paper was paid for twice – once through your taxes that pay for research grants and once through a portion of tuition that supports the library and indirectly allows for the journal’s subscription fee to be paid.

Remember the National Science Foundation paper on say evolution, maybe in Oecologia or Cell, that you had to look up and print out for lab?

Right now, you’re paying for it twice ““ once through your taxes that pay for research grants and once through a portion of tuition that supports the library and indirectly allows for the journal’s subscription fee to be paid.

But a new White House petition has the potential to change that. It’s now possible to distribute papers over the Internet for free, which means that it no longer makes sense to pay to distribute them. If we could ever condone billing taxpayers twice over for federally funded research, we have no excuse now.

Freely distributing papers over the Internet ““ a policy referred to as open access ““ allows for a wider audience and gives authors correspondingly more influence, thus enabling a more fertile academic community.

The petition, organized by a nonprofit advocacy group called Access2Research, asks the White House Office of Science and Technology to take an official position in favor of requiring a version of all federally funded research to be made freely available online.

The Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill mandating that this occurs within six months of publication, is currently dormant in Congress. The petition could contribute to the bill’s passing.

Undergraduates stand to benefit from open access ““ the high prices of course readers stem from licensing costs that result from publishers’ restrictive copyright agreements, according to Sharon Farb, an associate university librarian at UCLA.

University libraries stand to benefit from open access ­­”“ it would enable them to make the knowledge they preserve available to a wider public, which Farb characterizes as their mission.

Researchers (including undergraduates) stand to benefit from open access ““ the more people read their papers, the more influential they are, and the easier it is for academics to build on their work.

“Nobody wants their research to be unread and inaccessible, which is the way it is now,” said Christopher Kelty, head of the UC-wide University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.

Since the public is footing the bill for the research, they should have access to the finished products of that research.

As Kelty points out, papers are precisely those finished products.

If so much of the academic community has rallied around the banner of open access, why is it not standard practice right now?

One answer is that journal articles are not necessarily funded by the public, even though the research itself might be.

That is, although a researcher might be paid by a federal government grant to gather data, the publisher provides several services ““ connecting authors with volunteer peer reviewers, editing copy and so on ““ that help shape the finished paper.

Elizabeth Bartman, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, advanced this argument in an official statement opposing open access.

But much university library funding comes from public coffers, some of which is used to pay for journal subscriptions that the public does not have access to.

Furthermore, claims that journal subscription fees are a fair price to pay for the value that publishers add are rendered ludicrous by the gargantuan profit margins that major academic publishers record. For example, according to a story in the Economist, Elsevier, an academic publishing company, recorded a 37 percent profit margin in 2011, about 125 percent of Apple’s first quarter profit margin in 2012.

Opposition to open access actually stems from the potential it holds to disrupt academic publishing business models.

Traditional journal pricing was a reasonable response to the needs of academics in the pre-Internet world; you pay your subscription, you get to read the papers, and there is no viable alternative. But this is no longer the case.

Academics can now distribute their papers for free over the Internet, so it’s not necessary to pay for distribution. But the current system used by major publishers makes it impossible for readers to pay for the services they provide without also paying for distribution.

This petition, however, has comparatively little disruptive potential. Remember, if FRPAA passes thanks to the petition, it only asks that a version of the research be made freely available within six months.

According to Farb, if FRPAA passes, university libraries will still need to subscribe to journals in order to get timely access to the latest research, since the bill would permit academics to wait for up to a year before releasing versions of their taxpayer-funded research.

The petition itself comes down to a question of whether it is fair to charge the public twice for publicly funded research. I submit that it is not, and that we, as taxpayers and members of the academic community, should support the petition.

Email Mather at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion.