Re: US Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

                 ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

As presently drafted, the wording of the the timely and extremely 
welcome US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)

     http://cornyn.senate.gov/doc_archive/05-02-2006_COE06461_xml.pdf

stands to create needless problems for itself that could even 
make it fail under the already-gathering opposition from the 
publisher lobby:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/business/media/08journal.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1147107814-LFLCRUGWHIqcRqKhm1BhhQ

Yet the FRPAA's flaws are ever so easily correctable:

The gist of the problem is all there in this well-meaning quote 
by Senator John Cornyn (R, co-sponsor of the bill (with Senator 
Joe Lieberman, D: quotation is from Robin Peek's Newsbreak in 
Information Today): 
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060508-2.shtml

>     JC: "Making this information available to the public will lead
>     to faster discoveries, innovations and cures"..."

This same logic underlies the Bill itself.

The publisher lobby will (quite rightly) jump straight onto the 
two profound errors in this reasoning, and they will use it, for 
all its worth, against the Bill:

     (1) For most of the research literature, the public has neither the
     expertise nor the interest to read it.

     (2) Making it accessible to the public, does not make for cures!

Yet the remedy is so absurdly simple: The pressing reason for 
making research accessible to everyone is *not* because the 
general public has a pressing interest in reading it, nor because 
the *public's* reading it will result in cures. It is so that 
*researchers* -- those specialists by and for whom it was 
written, the ones with the expertise to use, apply and build upon 
it -- can access and apply it, to the benefit of the general 
public who paid for it.

In Senator Cornyn's quote, the following sentence comes second, 
and too late, already undone by the first statement (and the 
logic is similarly backwards in the Bill itself):

>   JC: "This bill will give the American taxpayer a greater
>   return on on its research investment."

The right way to put it is:

     "Making this information available to all researchers who can use,
     apply and build upon it will lead to faster discoveries, innovations
     and cures, thereby giving American taxpayers a greater return on
     their research investment. As a side bonus, the tax-paying public
     too will have access to as much as they may feel they wish to read
     of the research they have funded."

Today, most of published research is not accessible to much of 
its potential research-user population because no researcher's 
institution can afford paid access to more than a fraction of it. 
*That's* the real public rationale for mandating self-archiving: 
so that the tax-paying public that funds the research can benefit 
from the "discoveries, innovations and cures" that will arise 
from making research findings accessible to all researchers who 
can use and apply them.

     UK: "Maximising the Return on the UK's Public Investment in Research"
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html

     CANADA: "Making the case for web-based self-archiving"
     http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11534/

     EUROPE: "Publish or Perish -- Self-Archive to Flourish"
     http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw64/harnad.html

     AUSTRALIA: "Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on its Research
     Investment"
     http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000204/

Of course, the general public can and will be able to read 
whatever they wish of research too, if it is made OA. But it is 
foolish in the extreme to base the case for making research OA on 
the putative pressing need for the public to read it, and the 
putative "discoveries, innovations and cures" that the *reading 
public* will provide as a result!

Why would the FRPAA make such a silly strategic error? Because, 
superficially, the right of the tax-paying public to access the 
research that they have paid for looks like a spinnable "public 
good" issue as well as a spinnable "public right-to-know" issue. 
In that (flawed) form, it looks like viable political-campaign 
material.

But what makes it look like such a compelling naive-voter issue 
is also its fatal weakness, once the publisher lobby -- which is 
not at all naive -- attacks it: because the two points I have 
made above are dead-obvious, and can stop the momentum of OA dead 
in its tracks *if the FRPAA has no stronger rationale to back it 
up with*. Here is what I would immediately say if I were in the 
publisher lobby (and believe me, the publishers are already busy 
saying it):

      "The government wants to put the revenues of a viable industry
      at possible risk simply because it thinks the general public has
      a burning need to read mostly-technical texts written for a small
      population of specialists. (Here we have some public-library data on
      the infinitesimal rate at which the general public actually consults
      this kind of specialized material when it is made freely available
      to them: Is this what all the fuss is about? Because if it's
      instead just about access to the kind of clinical-health-related
      material that we *do* have evidence the public wants to consult,
      we can easily work out a side-deal instead of the FRPAA that leaves
      most of the research literature in closed access, as it is now,
      with some exceptions for articles of potential clinical relevance
      and hence public interest).

      "And why on earth does the government imagine that giving the
      general public access to the research literature gives rise to
      more or faster "discoveries, innovations and cures"? Who does the
      government imagine is providing those "discoveries, innovations and
      cures"? It is not the general public but the small population of
      specialists who already have access to the research."

The requisite stronger rationale to counter these obvious (and 
valid) criticisms is precisely: *research, from researchers, to 
researchers, for the sake of the research funder, the public* -- 
along with the empirical evidence (from comparative usage and 
impact data for articles within the same journal issues that have 
and have not been made OA by their authors by self-archiving 
them) that the "small population of specialists who already have 
access to the research" is in reality only a fraction of its 
potential research usership.

     http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

But the primary, solid and unassailable rationale -- the real 
rationale for OA all along: research for researchers -- needs to 
be put first, up-front, rather than trying to put the 
self-archiving mandate across under the banner of the weaker, 
defeasible rationale: "research for public use."

[This could be supplemented by the case for the need for access 
to the primary research literature for students who are learning 
to become researchers (again not the general public).]

Nothing at all is lost from remedying the FRPAA wording in this 
way. Public access still comes with the OA territory. But it 
immunizes the Bill, pre-emptively, against these obvious (and 
valid) prima facie publisher counter-arguments, whereas the 
current version is positively provoking them.

In addition to this remediable flaw in the FPRAA's fundamental 
rationale for mandating self-archiving, there is also the 
functional flaw I mentioned in my previous posting on this topic 
(that of allowing any delay at all).

     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Eharnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5340.html

This second flaw is also easily remedied (by what Peter Suber has 
come to call the "dual deposit/release policy") which is simply 
to mandate immediate deposit for *all* FRPAA-funded articles, and 
allow the 6-month delay only for the timing of the OA 
access-setting (Open Access vs. Closed Access), rather than for 
the timing of the deposit itself.

     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/weaker-OApolicy.htm

That way, the new "Request Email Eprint" button -- now 
implemented in both the Eprints and Dspace Institutional 
Repositories and allowing individual users to request an email 
version directly from the author, semi-automatically -- will tide 
over any 6-month delay almost as effectively as immediate OA for 
all those would-be users who need it.


https://secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk/notices/publicnotices.php?notice=902

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html