Access to Publicly-Funded Research: Why Not Now? | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 10/15/2009

Sometimes an initiative makes so much sense it's hard to understand why it hasn't already been implemented. The Federal Research Public Access (FRPAA) Act currently pending in Congress falls into that "well, duh!" category.

Taxpayers support basic science because it has multiple positive benefits. Scientists supported by public funds want their research to make a contribution to our understanding of the physical and natural world; in short, they want people to use their results. Librarians want to help the students and faculty at their institutions get their hands on that information without having to ransom it back from publishers.

The people pay for it. The authors want to share it. It's good for society to have access to the research we fund for the public good. So why is passing the Federal Research Public Access Act so hard?

This isn't rocket science
We have plenty of examples of open access that works. A major government agency has pulled it off. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), after a long struggle, was able to turn a voluntary program of deposit of grant-funded research findings into a requirement that became law in 2009.

FRPAA uses that model as a blueprint for other federal agencies, each of which puts over $100 million of our tax dollars to work annually in grants to fund research, including the Department of Agriculture; the Department of Energy; the Environmental Protection Agency; and NASA. Publishers would still have up to a six-month monopoly on the research results they publish, but after that the publicly-funded research would become . . . public.

And researchers have pulled it off on their own. An enlightened community of scientists have been uploading preprints to a site originally hosted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, now at Cornell—since 1991! Guess what: it didn't break the system. The arXiv now contains over half a million papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and other fields.

This seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. Before the Internet, scientists were accustomed to mailing printed preprints of their research to those who asked for them. I mean, that's the point, right? To get your research out there and make a difference? The arXiv made that sharing of research much faster and much more widely disseminated.

A New York Times story published back in 2001 described how this accessible archive has affected researchers around the world, highlighting the experience of a gifted undergraduate student in Prague who posted a paper on string theory that impressed well-established Ph.Ds. As a Stanford researcher put it, the arXiv has "turned the entire world into one big seminar."

Did this topple the mainstay of physics research, the august Physical Review? Uh, no. In fact, the 50th anniversary timeline for Physical Review Letters (PRL)features the founding of the arXiv as a landmark, noting "the arXiv and the Physical Review are linked: e-prints that are published in a journal can have a journal reference in the arXiv entry, and the APS supports citations to the arXiv."

Those crazy physicists. The American Physical Society even maintains an arXiv mirror site. Incidentally, PRL published 2000 manuscripts in the year the arXiv was founded. In 2006 they published over 4000.

If you need more reasons . . .

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access points to four reasons to support access to federally-funded research:

·     American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by the U.S. Government.

·     Widespread access to the information contained in these articles is an essential, inseparable component of our nation’s investment in science.

·     This and other scientific information should be shared in cost-effective ways that take advantage of the Internet, stimulate further discovery and innovation, and advance the translation of this knowledge into public benefits.

·     Enhanced access to and expanded sharing of information will lead to usage by millions of scientists, professionals, and individuals, and will deliver an accelerated return on the taxpayers’ investment.

Some in the publishing industry and some scholarly societies that haven't figured out a new model for sustaining their work that doesn't involve soaking libraries argue that open access is bad for business. They even intimate in horrified tones that peer review will wither if they stop making money. Those who do the peer review for free and often pay page charges to publishers point out that's complete nonsense.

But if you're really interested in the economics of sharing, you might want to check out the work of one of the latest Nobel laureates in economics. On October 12 the prize was awarded to Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University in large part for her contribution toward understanding the economics of the commons. Take a look at her article written with Charlotte Hess, "Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource" as an example. And guess what, you don't have to pay to read it; it's in the Digital Library of the Commons.

The political economy of science
Michael Polanyi, a philosopher of science, described the working of the scientific community in political and economic terms. He believed it operated as a "republic of science." Each of its citizens participates equally in a common purpose. Authority is built through a network of trust. No one person or authority decides what is true; it's decided by the shared expertise of the group, all of whom are working their particular part of a vast puzzle. The only way it works, though, is if they can share what they figure out.

That's why we need Congress to pass the FRPAA. If we give away our publicly-funded information and let it become merely a profitable commodity, available only to the few who can pay for it all over again, we will hinder the growth of knowledge. And that's not why we pour all of those tax dollars into science—to benefit publishers.

Do we still have a republic of science? To paraphrase Ben Franklin, only if we can keep it. 

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.