Eitan Arom: UC should make research open to public access

The University of California produces a prodigious amount of scholarly research, so much that the UC Office of the President estimated in 2010 that the University generates more than $3 million annually in revenues for the journal Nature.

Much of the research that goes into this total is funded by taxpayers, who then face hefty subscription fees if they want to access the journal’s articles. Asking private citizens to pay twice for this material is not only morally wrong, but also needlessly restricts the reach and impact of the University’s research.

The UC, a massive research conglomerate, has to take the lead in rectifying this situation by making its research freely available to the public.

On Friday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memorandum instructing federal agencies with a research budget greater than $100 million to develop an open access policy, effectively making the research they fund publicly accessible.

According to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, UCLA receives about 70 percent of its research funding from federal sources.

Moreover, the UC already has a head start regarding open access.

A policy currently being reviewed by the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, a committee of the UC Academic Senate, would make all publications by UC authors available in a free online repository. Such an action would be a significant and laudable change to the UC’s information policy.

In fact, the Academic Senate at UC San Francisco adopted a similar policy in May, making all research by UCSF faculty accessible to the public immediately.

Additionally, the California State Assembly is currently kicking around an open access bill for state-sponsored research, which accounts for a small but significant budget at UCLA.

The UC has every reason to take the lead on this issue by developing an open access policy. A certain category of licenses – called “Creative Commons” – can allow researchers to brand their material without restricting its use.

The UC Office of the President should find a way to leverage this type of legal tool to make the UC’s work freely available to the public, whether through the current policy under review by the Academic Senate or through another method. As a public university, part of the UC’s mission is to benefit the taxpayers who support it by generating research that saves lives, creates technology and generates economic activity. Open access, by disseminating public research in the private sector, contributes to that mission.

Moreover, the use of taxpayer-funded research to pad the bottom lines of publishers is a bizarre form of government subsidy. In both the Obama directive and similar legislation being considered in Congress, the proposed policies would reform that system by making research accessible after a brief “embargo period,” during which journals can charge for access.

That embargo period ranges from 12 months in the Obama directive to six in the legislation currently in Congress. After that time span, research would become available to the general public. At that time, private citizens and businesses would be able to freely access the research their tax dollars paid for in the first place. The private sector would then be able to freely use and build upon information and ideas generated by UCLA faculty.

Generally, that’s a good thing for faculty members.

Christopher Kelty, a UCLA professor of information studies and chairman of the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, said that a large majority of the professors he speaks with are in favor of the policy.

“There are things like citation counts, and readers and recognition in the public sphere – all of those things depend on an article being more widely available, not restricted,” Kelty said.

Only one sector benefits from restricting academic research.

“No one makes any money on the deal except the publishers,” said Sharon Farb, associate university librarian at UCLA. “Academics (publish) because that’s what they’re here to do.”

However, Farb added that the UCLA Library system does not plan on unsubscribing from any journals if delayed open access becomes law –- rather, it would continue to subscribe in order to circumvent the waiting period.

Farb said this embargo period acts to protect the revenue of publishers. Any system that included such an embargo would have little impact on the profits of most journals.

Indeed, publishers provide a valuable service, organizing peer review and ensuring the quality of publication, as well as generating the brand value that allows scientists to brag to their peers about having published in a preeminent journal like Nature.

Yet regardless of its effect on publishers, open access is a moral imperative for a scientific community built around collaboration. The value of collaboration is illustrated in the recent rise of open-source technology, or free software, which allows programmers to share, copy and modify code. Open-source programming environments allow users to write scripts that can then be widely used for statistical analysis and computing tasks.

Kelty, who has written a book and several articles on free software, said that open-source programs are the direct ancestor of open access. Just as open source allows for the sharing and modification of code, open access facilitates the same collaborative process for ideas.

Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Princeton all have open access policies. The UC’s leadership in groundbreaking research is on par with each of those universities; if we are to say the same about our information policy, we have no choice but to join this trend.

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