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Homer Simpson at the NIH

The LA Times editorial made me think of The Simpsons Movie. When Bart tells Homer that "this is the worst thing that ever happened to me," Homer's cheerful, paternal reply is, "It's the worst thing that ever happened to you--so far!" Yes, it can get worse ...

Of course taxpayer-funded research results should be made available at no or marginal cost to the citizenry. I'm a citizen, too, and I support this, just as I support publishing or posting requirements for any grant-funded research. (All universities should be doing this, too, by providing the resources to their university presses.) The problem is that this is NOT what the NIH is proposing. The NIH is not funding the apparatus for publishing. It hopes to "borrow" it from the publishing industry, which has its own interests and prerogatives. This is not a moral argument but an economic one. What the NIH lacks is the moral courage to stand up to its economic situation.

In an alternate universe, where the NIH acted thoughtfully and responsibly, the NIH would fund and develop the means to review and publish material based on NIH research. The money for this would come from other areas; it has to come from somewhere. If someone, anyone, developed a way to take advantage of the open access, peer-reviewed material (text-mining? authoring of syntheses?), that's fine.

The problem with the NIH plan is that the catch-and-release publishing it relies on (exclusive publishing rights for 6 or 12 months, open access thereafter) will inexorably undermine the economics of the original publications, even if those rights are temporarily exclusive. Older material has economic value, even if that value is in building Web destination sites that can be used to generate traffic for other revenue-based services. Publishers will factor in the lost value of the older material.

Publishers will naturally (they already are) be thinking of where best to put their capital to work. Over time less money will go into maintaining the current system; smaller publishers, especially small not-for-profit publishers, will suffer most. The overall costs of scholarly communications will rise. The NIH authorized repositories will exist, but be of diminishing value. By analogy, any American taxpayer can go to the IRS site for tax information, but most taxpayers have learned to go elsewhere, to books, other commercial Web sites, and accountants.

To put this simply: the question for a publisher is, Would you rather make 10% working with NIH-sponsored work or 20% working outside the NIH umbrella? The investment will move away from the NIH and the system that the NIH astonishingly thinks will persevere forever will becoming less valuable to everyone.

But as Homer says, the worst is yet to come.

Joe

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray English" <Ray.English@oberlin.edu>
To: "Liblicense L" <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2007 12:32 PM
Subject: LA Times editorial on accessing NIH research

Opinion
Editorial
Accessing NIH research
Congress should grant taxpayers free access to the medical
studies they fund

Los Angeles Times
July 27, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-nih27jul27,0,2419093.story?

Taxpayers pony up $28 billion annually for the National
Institutes of Health, the world's largest source of funding for
medical research. The payoff, in addition to the occasional
spectacular breakthrough, is more than 60,000 published studies
each year.

[SNIP]