ALA, ACRL Say All Federal Agencies Should Follow Mandatory Public Access Policies
Endorse short embargo period, partnerships for repositories
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 01/14/2010
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- Office of Science and Technology Policy sought comments
- Voluntary NIH policy didn't work
- The PDF format isn't sustainable
Responding to a call for comments on public access to federally funded research, the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have asked the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to support a mandatory policy for all agencies, with a short embargo period.
Many others are commenting on the OSTP blog. ALA and ACRL said that the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy, "as enacted, provides a tremendous public benefit and accelerates the advancement and practical application of, and access to, knowledge."
They noted that they have endorsed the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (FRPAA), which would require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication.
The details
The ALA/ACRL letter cited seven elements.
1. "All federal agencies funding significant research should adopt public access policies," they said, noting that "new research in many fields can have an immediate impact on the public good" and a consistent policy was needed for the management of grants and resulting output.
2. The policy should be mandatory, given problems with the voluntary version of the NIH Public Access Policy.
3. They recommended a 6-month maximum embargo, thus aligning U.S. policy with those in place in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union and enabling more timely use of research results.
4. "While the final published version of an article is preferred, we consider the authors’ peer-reviewed manuscript to be an acceptable substitute, as long as it is clearly noted as such, and includes the publication citation and a link to the final published article," they said, also endorsing "deposit of authors’ final manuscripts in their home institutional repositories in addition to the managed repository environment that would be established by the funding agencies."
5. "The authorized repository should provide support for converting the file to a standard mark-up language, such as the currently preferred XML, if the file is not submitted in that format," they said, warning that the current common use of the PDF format "does not support robust searching, linking, text-mining, or reformatting over the long-term" and is not fully accessible to the blind and reading impaired.
6. To control costs, rather than establishing independent proprietary repositories, federal agencies should seek to partner with each other or with academic institutions.
7. Given the role of peer-to-peer comments in the research process, "any measures or policies being adopted now must be carefully crafted to allow, and not inadvertently thwart, changes in scholarly practices that are emerging or that have yet to emerge."
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