Open Access May Heat Up in 2006

CURES Act would push NIH; UK Parliament revisits issue

By Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 2/1/2006

The battle for free public access to government-funded research may heat up after Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) introduced legislation to establish the American Center for Cures within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Included in that bill, known as the CURES Act, is an aggressive provision to help make taxpayer-funded biomedical research available to all potential users.

Although Congress directed the NIH to draft a policy to achieve that goal in 2005, what resulted was a weak plan that simply requested NIH-funded research be deposited into PubMed Central within a year after publication. A provision of the CURES Act, however, if passed, would require research funded by a number of government agencies to be made available within six months. In addition, the law could set penalties for noncompliance.

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) director Heather Joseph said that library groups were “gratified” to see the issue return to the Congressional agenda. “The aim of the bill is to speed cures by removing barriers,” Joseph noted. “One of those barriers is access to research.” While the legislation mentions PubMed Central as a repository, Joseph said the bill does apparently leave the door open for deposit in any publicly accessible storehouse. A coalition of library groups issued a statement praising the bill and promising support.

British MPs raise open access

In 2004, open access became an important subject for the British Parliament, as the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC), after four public hearings, voiced its support for exploration into open access, particularly institutional repositories. Then the official British government’s response almost entirely dismissed the committee’s work.

More than a year later, in a public debate held last December, that report, Scientific Publications: Free For All?, returned briefly to Parliament’s spotlight. The general consensus: the government’s dismissal of the report and in fact its understanding of the report was wrong. MP Phil Willis, the new chair of the STC, said he was “staggered by the level of interest and the intensity of feeling on the subject.” Issues touched on include the impact of digitization, the open access movement, the cost of library subscriptions, and the hefty profits of major commercial science publishers.

At least one member rose to the defense of publishers: MP Edward Vaizey, within whose constituency resides Reed Elsevier, Blackwell, Macmillan, and Oxford University Press. “I do not accept that the problem lies with publishers,” Vaizey said, “and I do not accept there is an access crisis.” Vaizey stated he was wary of the government intervening to “ensure a new model gains ground.” While feelings may differ among MPs, it seemed there was consensus that the government look again at the 2004 report.