Washington, We Have a Problem | Peer to Peer Review
Giving a publishers' letter opposing FRPAA a closer look
Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 05/06/2010
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You’re in a place that seems strangely familiar. There’ a slogan on the wall about freedom and access and principles, and you think “ah, Budapest. Or is it Berlin or Bethesda?” But no, we’re in the nation’s capital. And the principles about freedom and access . . . they’re strangely different.
Language has become twisted like a möbius strip. You’re traveling through another dimension, a realm of the imagination. You’re entering the open access Twilight Zone. Once again, some of the members of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), have sent a letter to Congress protesting the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), making the following claims:
- FRPAA is unnecessary
- FRPAA will undermine copyright
- FRPAA will harm peer review and damage the quality of scientific research
- FRPAA will force costly burdens on government agencies
- FRPAA will give those government agencies an unfair opportunity to compete with a “well established marketplace.” (Librarians can vouch for how well-established it is.)
- FRPAA will wreak havoc by recklessly gambling on an untested experiment with “attendant risks of failure and collateral damage that U.S. research simply cannot afford.” (Be afraid, be very afraid.)
It’s accompanied by a link to a website that spells out the “Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science.” So far as I can tell, these principles can be boiled down to “we’ll make it free if we feel like it. Sometimes we feel like it. Leave us alone.”
Surely you’re joking, Mr. Publisher
As to the first objection, that FRPAA isn’t necessary, I am reminded of an argument back in the early 1980s at the front desk at a hotel in Novgorod, Russia. We were traveling with two small and very tired children and had reserved a room for the night but instead had somehow ended up with two rooms with narrow twin beds in different parts of the hotel. (In those days, travel arrangements to the Soviet Union were handled by Intourist, a Soviet agency that relieved visitors of any uncertainty about where they should spend their hard currency.) No matter what we said, the answer was always the same: “You khave no broblem.” She probably knew how to say it in 14 languages.
She won the argument. But whenever I hear someone swear in complete contradiction to reality that there’s no need to fix what seems obviously a huge mess, I picture the hotel clerk with her fixed stare and automatic declaration that it was all very simple. We had no problem.
The publishers’ letter is equally dismissive. Depositing research in public databases “duplicates existing mechanisms that enable the public to access research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities published in scholarly journals.”
Really? Librarians don’t see it that way. We’re the ones who have to negotiate journal cuts and slash our book budgets to make ends meet. We’re the ones who try to balance the payments we have to make for copyright fees against things that would do more to promote research and student learning. We know our students and faculty resort to contacting authors or friends at other institutions, seeking copies of articles in journals that aren’t available by interlibrary loan anywhere in the region, hoping someone can provide a Samizdat copy of scarce research. Trust me, Congress—we have a problem.
Copywhat?
As to the second claim, I can’t imagine how FRPAA undermines copyright, though I could easily argue that those who own intellectual property that they don’t create have done more damage to copyright than anyone else. The balance has been tilted so unfairly to one side—toward monopoly and against the public interest—that copyright no longer promotes science or the useful arts. Instead, it creates a barrier to sharing scientific knowledge, a barrier that is particularly galling when it’s to research findings that taxpayers have funded for the public good.
The third point is nonsense. This notion that open access research is not peer reviewed is frankly the kind of pernicious scare-mongering that burned the AAP before and led responsible publishers such as the Rockefeller University Press to demand they clarify that not all members agreed with this claim.
Does the group think anyone will fall for these scare tactics again? I grant that administering the peer review process is not without cost, but there’s a lot of open access research that is just as rigorously peer reviewed as the publications of these societies. All of the things that they claim will be rendered impossible if FRPAA were passed and disrupted their revenue stream—back-office handling of the paperwork, software that lets authors submit their papers digitally and distribute it to reviewers around the world—in fact is being done by open access journals, often using open source software available to anyone.
The twin claims that a) government agencies will be unfairly penalized and b) government agencies will eat publishers for breakfast cancel each other out, so I won’t bother critiquing them. But the final argument, that this is a reckless experiment that might spin out of control and create a black hole that will swallow up the world . . . oh, wait, that was the rumor about the Large Hadron Collider, the one that didn’t destroy the universe after all, but instead sustained serious damage thanks to a baguette.
What I meant to say is that the concern that this is an untested and potentially devastating “one-way experiment” is utter nonsense. The NIH has experimented quite thoroughly, first by asking nicely if grantees would deposit their articles (not a success) and then in 2008 insisting that deposit was required as a condition of funding. (Bingo! It works!) Two years into it, there is no evidence that a black hole has opened up to swallow publishers or peer review as a result. The Wellcome Trust in the UK has been requiring funders to make their results public “as a fundamental part of its charitable mission and a public benefit” for the same period of time. Not a single publication, to my knowledge, has ceased as a result.
Duty-free markets
As we struggle with budget cuts the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics reports that one of the corporations that signed this letter experienced a good year, with over $2 billion in profits. That could fund a lot of access, but it doesn’t. It’s less worried about the advancement of science than it is about preserving a business model that will eventually fail. The trick is to hold off its failure as long as possible.
Meanwhile, what do these publishers recommend we do to ensure the progress of science? Here’s their solution to the problem we “don’t have”:
Acting on its own in the free market, the publishing industry already has made more research information available to more people than at any time in history. Articles are widely available in major academic centers and private-sector online databases, as well as through public libraries, state universities and interlibrary loan programs.In other words, “You have no problem. Just go to the library.”
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 (see review), will be published by Minotaur Books this month.
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