Life After the NIH

On January 15, 2005, a standing-room-only crowd of librarians listened as a panel of experts, moderated by Columbia University's Jim Neal, voiced support for the National Institute of Health's (NIH) proposal to mandate free online access to the research it funds. On the dais at this SPARC/ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) forum at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Boston, there was a librarian from the National Library of Medicine. There was an eloquent scientist. The star of the session, however, was a citizen named Sharon Terry.

A former college chaplain, Terry is a leading voice in the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a key ally with SPARC in lobbying for the NIH's access plan. She captivated librarians, even brought some to tears with the story of how she and her husband were reduced to "stealing passwords" and other schemes to access medical literature in libraries—literature that eventually helped them to help their doctors treat their two young children, both suffering from a rare form of cancer. As the session closed, a picture of Terry's recovering children smiled down from the big screen.

Meanwhile, on the morning of the very same day Terry enthralled librarians, the heads of collections from some of the nation's largest and most prestigious university libraries—known as the "Big Heads"—also met to discuss progress on a range of issues. When the subject of scholarly communication came up, one prominent librarian voiced "dismay" over how open access had come to dominate the scholarly communication discussion. Another librarian concurred, wondering if librarians' time would be better spent discussing more immediate solutions to their collection issues.

At the same time, another series of events was playing out. Just one day before the start of Midwinter, the NIH abruptly cancelled a conference call scheduled for January 18, where it was expected to announce its new policy. Rumors abounded at the SPARC/ACRL session that the NIH was set to abandon its initial proposal requiring grantees to deposit their papers for access within six months and instead would now merely "request" they do so within a year.

The rumors proved true. On February 3, NIH director Elias Zerhouni gamely did what bureaucrats often must do—he stepped up and touted his drastically altered plan as a "win-win." SPARC executive director Rick Johnson, one of the NIH proposal's most ardent supporters, also did what he had to do—he found a silver lining, calling the "NIH discussion" a powerful demonstration of why "open access is a matter of good public policy."

But after months in which the open access movement made national headlines, in the end, little changed. Or did it?

In the wake of the NIH proposal, there is clearly more scrutiny than ever on the open access movement even though the NIH did not propose open access. More than 6000 public comments were filed on the proposal from September to November 2004. One doesn't have to read all those statements to know that some serious concerns were raised—simply look at the final policy. But in addition to the concerns voiced by opponents to the NIH, there now also seems to be a rift opening among open access advocates. What do we mean when we say open access? And how best do we get there?

For SPARC, there was little choice but to tout the NIH's final policy. Since 2002, the group, started by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to bring change to a serials landscape marked by increasingly complex, bundled deals and rampant inflation, has tied its fate to open access. But in choosing a strategy to push open access from an academic issue to a mainstream, public access issue, did SPARC inadvertently set back the open access cause, or, at the very least, confuse it even further?

"When the history of open access is written, I think the library community will be great heroes of the movement," says Stevan Harnad, a psychologist and an early, influential OA activist. "They deserve the first credit for launching the chain of events that led to open access. But they've bungled it, too. They've simply got muddled."

"Open access is separate from the serials crisis," Harnad says flatly. The sooner the serials crisis in libraries is disentangled from open access, he adds, the better for everyone. While it is understandable that librarians' support of open access grows from their own experiences with the market—skyrocketing journal prices, problems with digital copyright and permissions issues, archiving and preservation—these issues, Harnad says, have now become conflated with open access.

Johnson, on the other hand, views open access through a somewhat different prism. "I see open access as a means to introduce market forces into a system that largely is devoid of them," he explains. "Our task is to break this monopoly and at the same time enable a competitive, dynamic market for services that add value to research. Open access accomplishes this."

Since its beginning, SPARC has been an abiding agent for education about problems in scholarly publishing, for advocacy of solutions, and "for incubation of real-world demonstrations of business and publishing solutions," Johnson explains. "In the early years, the emphasis was on grass-roots education," he says. "Today, however, SPARC has turned to public policy advocacy as well in hopes of also driving change from the top down."

Indeed, much of 2004 was devoted to pushing the NIH proposal, and much of SPARC's 2005 strategic plan concerning public advocacy is dedicated to monitoring and helping to market the NIH's final policy. That has some, including Harnad, questioning whether this is the best use of librarians' time and resources.

The NIH policy, Harnad contends, is an example of the library community's very good intentions gone bad. "The NIH endorses back access, not open access," he explains. "I mildly supported the policy at a six-month delay, but at 12 months, and as a request, I got off the boat." Specifically, Harnad argues, the NIH policy in essence does little more than create a de facto embargo period of 12 months. "If this is how open access is being defined by the NIH, six months, or a year," Harnad says, "then of course that's what some people will do."

In response, Johnson says it is a mistake to take the current NIH policy at face value and that the public discussion SPARC has helped fuel will crystallize into success for open access. "Without such a clear symbol of why we need open access, change on a broad scale would occur at a slower pace," he says. "I am convinced that Congress will not be satisfied with a de facto 12-month embargo, and I can't imagine the NIH will be either."

That statement, however, only portends further confusion for stakeholders in the NIH plan. Is it possible that actual compliance with a policy called a "win-win" just a few months ago by NIH might not be satisfactory?

"The current policy is not the end of the discussion," Johnson emphasizes. "We'll soon know what percentages of eligible papers make their way into PubMed Central and the average delay in public availability. If the result does not respond to the wishes of Congress, then I expect NIH will make adjustments."

Meanwhile, in February 2005, just weeks after the NIH policy was announced, representatives from some of the world's most prestigious scientific societies in Europe, all signatories to the 2003 Berlin Declaration, one of a dizzying array of recent pledges to pursue open access, met at the University of Southampton, England. At that meeting, known as Berlin 3, signatories put forth their own two-part recommendation on how best to get to the goal of 100 percent OA.

If SPARC is now concerned with garnering broad support for change, Berlin 3 is now concerned with just the opposite—going after open access article by article, institution by institution. Its first recommendation: a policy that mandates author self-archiving in their institutional repositories.

"This policy is not an ideological policy, or a copyright policy, it is administrative," Harnad says. "This recommendation says that in order to be visible, for promotion and evaluation, you must deposit your work into your institution's archive." Currently, he notes, roughly 92 percent of the top 10,000 academic journals have given the green light for authors to self-archive immediately; 79 percent, including industry-leader Elsevier, under heavy criticism from libraries for its aggressive pricing and bundling practices, have given the green light to self-archive postprints—that is the fully edited, peer-reviewed final text that would be searchable and usable, freely on the web—although, it should be noted, not the publishers' version.

Still, despite the large number of academic journals permitting author self-archiving, few researchers do it. Why? Surely, more resources need to be devoted to building institutional repositories, for one. It takes effort, too, for example, physically tagging and keying articles. Further, caught in the heated crossfire of the open access debate, a fair number of researchers are likely confused about what is actually permissible, unclear about how to use their institutional respositories, or may be simply choosing to keep their heads down.

A clear policy among university administrations requiring self-archiving, Harnad argues, would dramatically increase the number of articles available through open access—not just research but final articles deposited in institutional repositories.

In addition, the Berlin 3 signatories strongly encouraged authors to submit to open access journals, when possible. "It is not that OA journals are being neglected," Harnad explains, "just that they are clearly a tiny minority option at this point. If we're talking about 100 percent open access, and currently only five percent of journals are open access, it would take three or four decades at least to reach 100 percent OA through journals alone."

Open access and taxpayer access to research are, of course, desirable goals. So is a burgeoning network of institutional archives.

Of course, there are critics of this approach as well—those who argue that repositories carry unknown costs, might compete with some journals and could cause confusion among researchers, or lack long-term preservation strategies. These highlight the most vexing issue surrounding open access debate—there is simply little hard evidence. If the open access debate has taken on a religious zeal, it is because there is a leap of faith involved.

Still, institutional repositories suggest an immediate role for librarians in open access. Already library-based repositories such as those at Caltech and the University of California's eScholarship are proving to be excellent resources. At the University of Southampton, for example, librarians have a proxy service that will take researchers' articles, key them into their repositories, tag them, and see to their visibility and preservation. In addition to its many other activities, SPARC is also part of the repository effort, sponsoring a session on institutional repositories at the recent ACRL meeting in Minneapolis.

"I'd say SPARC gets it about 90 percent right," Harnad says. "But that ten percent it gets wrong could hold us back ten years or more." If the NIH's policy of voluntary submission within a year is cloned by others, he argues, it would do more harm than good. Again, we'll have to wait to see if the evidence bears that out.

Nevertheless, librarians are right to support open access. Not because it might solve their budget woes but simply because access is core to librarianship. In the wake of a disappointing NIH policy, a persistent serials crisis, a confusing, mixed message among supporters, and, of course, firm opposition to open access, if the NIH has shown us anything, it is that it is time to regroup.

There is indeed a common interest among librarians, researchers, the public, and scholarly publishers in seeing open access succeed. Many advocates are pulling for that success. Imagine if everyone pulled in the same direction.