Protect the NIH Public Access Mandate From the Conyers Copyright Caricature

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

The publisher anti-Open-Access lobby is trying to use a time when 
the economy is down and the head of NIH is out to slip through a 
Bill that would undo one of the most positive things Congress has 
done for science: the NIH Public Access Act, which requires 
NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public 
that paid for it.

The Conyers Bill 
<http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&tab=nw&q=nih%20conyers%20bill%20> 
is now trying to overturn the Public Access Act on the basis of 
copyright double-talk that would be ludicrous if it were not so 
ominous:

The published reports of publicly funded research findings are 
given away by their researcher-authors free for all in order to 
maximize their usage and impact. The Conyers Bill proposes to 
"protect" their work in exactly the same way it protects 
proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers, produced and 
sold by their authors to maximize their royalty income: The 
tendentiously misnamed "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act 
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.6845:>" would 
rescind NIH's requirement that the results of the research it 
funds with taxpayer money should be deposited, free for all, on 
the Web.

The Conyers Bill's copyright arguments -- almost transparently 
contrived and arbitrary -- have been decisively refuted point for 
point by Law Professor Michael Carroll and other experts, just as 
all the other far-fetched, self-serving arguments marshalled by 
the publisher anti-OA lobby have (despite the hiring of " 
pit-bull Eric Dezenhall as public-relations consultant) been 
repeatedly rebutted time they were unleashed.

It is time not only for OA advocates, but the general public -- 
both US and worldwide (because US OA policy has vast global 
implications) -- to make their voices heard in favor of the NIH 
Public Access Policy and against the Conyers Bill's Caricature of 
Copyright. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is hard at work to 
save the NIH Mandate; please consult them on how you can help. 
You can also express your support for mandating more OA rather 
than less to President Obama.

This would also be an opportune time to shore up the NIH Mandate 
itself with a small but important change in implementational 
detail that will not only increase its reach and make it a far 
better model for emulation worldwide, but it will also strengthen 
it against mischievous attempts like the Conyers Bill to 
undermine it:

(1)* Open Access is Open Access regardless of where on the Web a 
paper is freely accessible.

(2)* Currently, the NIH mandate specifically stipulates deposit 
in a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR), PubMed Central. .

(3)* The majority of journals already formally endorse OA 
self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it only in the 
author's ownInstitutional Repository (IR) rather than a Central 
(3rd-party) Repository (CR). (This is because they fear that 
endorsing deposit in 3rd party CRs would open the door to 
free-riding on their content by rival publishers.)

(4)* Apart from being immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider 
objection, IR deposit is also distributed across all the 
universities and research institutions in the world: That makes 
it a much more diffuse, hence difficult target for the publisher 
anti-OA publisher lobby than PubMed Central, NIH or Congress.

(5)* IRs also make it possible to deposit papers as "Closed 
Access" rather than Open Access during any publisher embargo 
period. The Closed-Access paper's metadata (authors, title, 
journal, date, abstract, etc.) are freely accessible and 
searchable webwide, and link to an IR Button that allows 
individual users to email the author an automatic request for an 
individual copy for research use with just one click, which the 
author can in turn fulfill with just one click, almost 
instantaneously. Over 60% of journals already endorse immediate 
OA for IR deposits. The Button provides "Almost OA" for the rest, 
to tide over researcher needs during any embargo.

(6)* Hence if the NIH deposit mandate specifically stipulated 
deposit in the author's IR, rather than deposit in PubMed 
Central, it could harvest the deposit's metadata to PubMed 
Central, harvest the full-text after the allowable embargo, and 
moot most of the copyright issues, while indirectly providing 
"Almost OA" even during the embargo (via the Request-a-Copy 
Buttons of the global network of IRs distributed across the 
planet).

(7)* This small change in implementational detail in NIH's funder 
mandate would also motivate and reinforce the adoption of 
*institutional* mandates at all NIH's fundees' institutions, 
which would in turn help reinforce and protect the NIH mandate 
(from Conyers-like attacks) as well as extending it to all 
institutional research output, funded and unfunded.

(8)* Stipulating IR deposit rather than CR deposit will also make 
the NIH funder mandate a model that can be emulated worldwide, 
globalizing the adoption of both funder and institutional 
mandates and helping to usher in universal OA at long last.

*Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum