SUMMARY: The publisher lobby can defeat the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) (to mandate self-archiving of all federally funded research so as to make it freely accessible online) if FRPAA is promoted merely or mainly as a means of providing public (student, practitioner, patient, general public) access to publicly funded research. Publishers can and will argue (and already are arguing) that the public does not really want or need access to most of this specialized peer-reviewed journal literature, across all fields (not just clinically relevant medicine), written by and for specialized researchers, and that it is hence not justified to put publishers' subscription revenues at potential risk by mandating that this entire literature must be made freely accessible online. Instead, publishers will propose special arrangements in which they themselves would make the tiny fraction of what they publish that is of potential public interest freely accessible online. The right response to this by FRPAA proponents is to make it very explicit that the primary purpose of the bill is not public READS, but "CURES" -- i.e., the public benefits that come from applying and building upon research findings in further research and practical applications, for the sake of which the research was publicly funded in the first place. And CURES come from researcher access and usage -- researchers applying and building upon current research in further research and applications -- not from public access and usage. Because no researcher can currently afford access to anywhere near all the research they might need to read and use, researcher self-archiving substantially accelerates and increases research usage and impact, which is the measure of speed and progress toward CURES. And substantially accelerating and increasing progress toward CURES -- unlike providing public READS -- does outweigh any hypothetical risk to publisher revenues (although there is as yet absolutely no evidence that self-archiving reduces subscription revenues.) Moreover, with free online access (Open Access) to self-archived research, the public (students, practitioners, patients, tax-payers) get full access too, as a secondary benefit, but not because that is the primary benefit from or justification for mandating Open Access self-archiving.
ANON: " Your arguments are totally logical. However, a factor you are not taking into account: if researchers are focused on their research- impact - politicians are focused on their own image and reelection potential. It is the politicians who need to vote in FRPAA."
And it is the
publisher lobby that will be pressuring them not to. SPPP (Student/Practitioner/Patient/Public) access is a good intro, to get the politicians' and voters' attention, but then you need a follow-through that can hold up against the publisher lobby -- and SPPP-access has no follow-through when publishers inevitably say, as they will (and are already):
"You want to mandate that our business revenue should be put at risk for the sake of SPPP-access, yet there is no evidence that the SPPP reads (or has the slightest wish to read) most of the highly specialized research that we publish! Why not just make a side-deal that we make publicly accessible that tiny fraction of (mostly clinical-medical) research that is likely to be of SPPP interest, and leave the rest of it -- which is the overwhelming majority of it -- alone, rather than putting all of our revenues at risk for no objective reason?
(And denigrate logic all you like, in the end, the pro-mandate argument has to make sense, otherwise the publisher lobby wins and the OA self-archiving mandate -- and the best interests of research and the public that funds it -- lose.)
The requisite follow-through is
CURES, not SPPP-access. Students, practitioners, patients and the public do not produce CURES,
researchers do. And the reason researcher usage and impact is so important is not because it produces money and prizes for researchers, but because it generates CURES. In fact, that is what research is funded for, not to produce reading matter for the SPPP.
("CURES" is of course over-simplified too, and medically biassed, but it will do, as long as it is put in scare-quotes or CAPs: more generally, it means applications of research, including technology; even more generally, it means pure research progress itself, which might eventually lead to applications; and when it comes to social science and especially the humanities, which rarely has any applications at all, it means the production of specialized scholarship, which we presumably fund because we think it is a social benefit to promote scholarship, not because the general public or even students actually need or wish to read the peer-reviewed journal articles reporting the research the public funds, written by specialists for specialists, but because the public wants to promote scholarly progress, which may eventually trickle down into education.)
ANON: " Is there evidence that FRPAA will result in the kind of citations that politicians care about - photo ops and positive pieces in the news, funding support and votes so that they can be re-elected?"
CURES produce photo-ops, and for researchers to produce CURES,
researchers (not SPPP) need to have access to the ongoing research, in order to use it and build on it.
Moreover, the politicians are not just responsive to votes, as you know, but also to money and lobbying, especially from big business, and to what fosters or threatens business revenue flows. Yes, "public access to publicly funded research" sounds like a good vote-getter on the surface, even if it doesn't amount to much research the public would actually want to access and. But the publishing lobby is another matter, and they are the ones to contend with now.
It's not the vote-getting power of the OA principle that has been blocking the
RCUK policy for two years and that has watered down the ,a href="http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm">NIH public access policy to near-nothingness: it's the publisher lobby; and this time FRPAA has to come forearmed: If it tries to coast on the public-access-to-publicly-funded-research slogan alone, or primarily, it will be defeated, no matter how sexy it may sound as a vote-getter. (And, by the way, most individual citizens don't read research and couldn't care less about this issue, one way or the other.)
Publishers will float doomsday scenarios about ruinous risks to their ability to make ends meet if self-archiving is mandated (not based on any evidence, but sounding ominous just the same). These doomsday scenarios need a more convincing answer than that "we are doing it so the public can read the research it funds" -- because then the publishers will simply adduce the abundant evidence that the public is
not reading most of the peer-reviewed research they publish, and would not and could not have the slightest interest in ever reading it. So the revenue-risk is completely unjustified.
Not so if the rationale is CURES rather than SPPP READS, for research progress and the possibility of cures is the very reason we fund research in the first place. CURES -- but not READS -- offset publishers' hypothetical doomsday scenario very effectively.
ANON: " To put it another way: is there research showing that politicians care about researcher-impact at all, never mind enough to stand up to the publisher anti-OA lobbying?"
Politicians care about CURES, and "cures" is the simple (simplistic) encapsulation of research uptake, usage, application, productivity and progress. And that in turn is something that can only come from
researchers using and applying research, not from the public, reading research. And it is for CURES that the public is funding research in the first place, not for its own READing delectation.
So the right public issue politicians need to focus on is
CURES, not SPPP-access; and CURES means research usage and impact, which comes from researcher-use, not from SPPP-reading.
ANON: " Arguments focussed on students, patients, and the public are much more likely to persuade politicians than arguments based exclusively on benefits for researchers. The two streams of arguments complement each other. It is not necessary, or desirable, to limit pro-OA arguments."
OA is not about benefits to researchers! It is about CURES. Researcher access means more progress and momentum toward CURES.
Moreover, it is now no longer just about persuading politicians but about resisting the publisher lobby, which is trying to
dissuade politicians. Answers to their objections are needed too; and SPPP-access is not the answer, CURES is; and that means researcher-access, not SPPP-access. (Yet, let us not forget, SPPP-access can and will come too, with the OA territory: So it's fine to mention both benefits, but essential to make it clear that CURES is the primary rationale for mandating self-archiving, and READS merely a secondary benefit.
ANON: " The politician who cares about patients but thinks the researcher-arguments are abstract, will support a patient-based OA argument. It is unlikely that a person with this viewpoint would support a research-only focused argument."
The focus is on CURES, not on abstract researcher-arguments: Everyone knows that CURES come from researchers, not from students, practitioners, patients or the general public. I think that is a concrete matter that politicians and voters are quite capable of understanding. And it has the virtue of trumping the publishers' arguments about hypothetical revenue risks: progress toward actual CURES (monitored in the form of
research impact) trumps hypothetical revenue risks; SPPP-READS do not.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
