December 7, 2003

Dear Mr. Grant,

Here are some responses to the RBMS call for comments on business models
for funding scientific research.  My comments will focus on ways that
the federal government could do more to promote \*open access\* to
scientific research. 

This follows up our telephone conversation of November 21.  If you\'d
like me to resubmit these comments in another format, please just let me
know.

\* Executive summary

I propose that all federal agencies that fund research require open
access to the data and articles that result from their research grants,
and that they offer to pay the processing fees charged by open-access
journals when grantees publish their results in such journals.  All
scientific research is more accessible and useful when scientists have
open access to it, and taxpayer-funded research should be available to
taxpayers online without the need for additional payments. 

\* Introduction on open access

\"Open access\" is free online access.  If we want more detail, we can
define it as the availability of full-text on the public internet, free
of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. 
Open-access articles might be under copyright, but the copyright holder
will have consented in advance to free online access and to allow
unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing,
searching, linking, and crawling.  The copyright holder might consent to
open access and still retains the right to block the distribution of
mangled or misattributed copies of his or her work.

Open access has been endorsed by a wide variety of universities,
libraries, professional associations, public and private funding
agencies, and individual scientists.  Here are some of the major
statements of the principles of open access, each accompanied by the
signatures of endorsing individuals and organizations.

Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 14, 2002)

<http://www.soros.org/openaccess/>

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 20, 2003)

<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm>

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
Humanities (October 22, 2003)

<http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html>

(I am the principal drafter of the Budapest statement, and participated
in the drafting of the Bethesda statement.)

The primary benefit of open access is sharing knowledge and accelerating
research.  Conventional scientific publishing puts research literature
behind price barriers (subscription fees, licensing fees, pay-per-view
fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing
restrictions), which make it less accessible and less useful than it
could be.  Both the authors and readers of this literature would benefit
from removing these barriers.  So would the public.  These access
barriers not only slow down research, but delay and reduce all the
benefits of research, from medicines and technologies to environmental
health, economic prosperity, and public safety. 

Open access is economically feasible for literature produced by authors
with no expectation of payment.  Scientific journal articles and related
writings (preprints, technical reports, theses and dissertations) fall
into this category.  Scientists write research articles to advance
knowledge and their own careers, not for royalties.  They write for
impact, not for money.  They have always wanted to disseminate their
work as widely as possible, but until recently they were limited by the
physical nature of print.  The internet allows wider dissemination and
lower costs at the same time, and therefore holds enormous promise for
sharing and accelerating research.

The law, technology, and economics of open access all argue in its
favor.  Open access depends on the consent of the copyright-holder
consent, not the violation of copyright.  It has been technically
feasible, and increasingly commonplace, since the birth of the
internet.  We know it is economically sustainable because the cost of
vetting and disseminating research articles online is much lower than
the price we now pay for access to them from conventional journals. 

In the past decade or so, groups around the world have been working out
ways to deliver open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their
preprints.  Here are the landmark events in this history:

Timeline of the open-access movement

<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm>

\* How the federal government can use its science research funds to
promote open access and thereby promote research

(1)  I propose that all federal agencies that fund research put an
open-access condition on their research grants.  The condition would
simply require the grantee to provide open-access to the results of the
funded research.  This could be done through an open-access archive at
the researcher\'s university, an open-access archive at the funding
agency, an open-access journal, or in several other ways.

Open access to taxpayer-funded research should be the default, but there
are reasons to recognize some exceptions.  For example, we needn\'t
require open access to classified research, or to research results that
generate income for their authors, such as books, software, music,
films, or patentable discoveries.  But when the research is
non-classified and results in articles, technical reports, theses and
dissertations, or other works that authors willingly publish without
payment, then the open-access condition should apply.

Just last month (November 18, 2003) the EPA launched Science Inventory
\<<http://cfpub.epa.gov/si/>\>, an open-access repository of EPA-funded
research.  This is a model for other federal agencies that fund
research.  The EPA recognized that taxpayer-funded research should be
accessible to taxpayers without further charge.  It had long since
assembled the database of research, but until last month it restricted
access to EPA employees. 

One way for federal funding agencies to provide open access to the
results of taxpayer-funded research is to follow the lead of the EPA. 
Undoubtedly different agencies are in different stages of readiness to
take such a step.  Some might have the material already digitized and
web-ready, but accessible only to insiders.  Some might have to assemble
the material.  Some might be willing and eager to make it accessible to
the public, but are waiting for a green light from Congress or the White
House.  Some might be less willing.  A recommendation from RBMS and
ultimately the NSTC or OSTP could make all the difference for some of
them even if we never adopt a policy to require it.

But following the EPA is not the only way to provide public access to
publicly funded research.  EPA hosts its own open-access archive.  Other
funding agencies could host their own archives too, or use a common,
pre-existing archive (like PubMed Central), cooperate in launching a new
common archive (for disciplines not within the scope of PubMed Central),
or simply require grant recipients to provide open access to their
research results and leave them a choice of means to comply.  In the
last case, grant recipients could deposit their work in an open-access
archive hosted by their university or professional association, or
publish it in an open-access journal.  If authors have a choice of
means, then they retain the freedom to publish in the journals of their
choice, while the public still gets the benefit of open access to the
results. 

I sketch one way to give authors a choice of means in my Model
Open-Access Policy for Foundation Research Grants,
\<<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/foundations.htm>\>.  I don\'t
pretend that the government could adopt this policy as is, and I\'m not
citing it here for that purpose.  But it does try to imagine the
practical complexities of putting an open-access condition on research
grants, and it offers contract terms that address these complexities. 
If my solutions to these problems don\'t suit federal funding agencies,
then my annotations will at least identify some of the issues and may
help policy-makers save time in their deliberations.

When more federal funding agencies have their own open-access archives,
a central authority like the OSTP or OMB should work out guidelines
their administration and maintenance.  For example, the guidelines could
require steps to assure the long-term preservation of their contents. 

The guidelines should also require the archives to comply with the Open
Archives Initiative (OAI) metadata harvesting protocol.  This will make
the separate archives interoperable so that OAI-compliant search engines
can search across them and spare users the need to know which archives
exist, where they are located, or what they contain.  For details see
\<<http://www.openarchives.org/>\>.  There are half a dozen open-source
software packages to create and maintain OAI-compliant archives, so this
is not an expensive condition to meet.

The guidelines could also make clear that authors of these articles and
research reports, when not government employees, will hold the copyright
to their work.  That is, my recommendation does not go as far as the
Sabo bill (H.R. 2613),
\<<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.2613:>\>, in requiring
all the results of federally funded research to enter the public
domain.  The simple reason is that copyright-holder consent is just as
good as the public domain in creating a legal basis for open access, and
copyright-holder consent can be obtained through the contract by which a
federal agency awards a research grant.

Federally funded researchers would not only hold the copyright to their
work, they would be free to publish the work anywhere else they liked. 
The open-access dissemination required as a condition of federal funding
would be non-exclusive.  It\'s purpose is to accelerate research and
repay the taxpayers, not to reduce the freedom or income of
federally-funded scientists and scholars. 

\(2\) I would also like to recommend that funding agencies require their
grantees to provide open access to the \*data\* collected in the course
of the funded research, not just to full-text research articles and
related writings.

While the rationale for this second recommendation is roughly the same
as for the first, there are additional complexities in mandating open
access to data, and at the same time additional arguments for doing so. 
However, because my primary recommendation is for open access to
literature, I will not elaborate here on the extra considerations that
apply to data.  But I would be happy to do so at any time. 

\(3\) Finally, I recommend that federal funding agencies consider the
cost of open-access dissemination to be part of the cost of research. 
When open-access journals charge authors a processing fee to cover their
costs (so that they needn\'t charge readers or libraries), federally
funded authors should be allowed to pay these fees out of their research
grants. 

A number of major private foundations, including the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute and the Wellcome Trust, have already agreed to pay the
processing fees charged by open-access journals.  BioMed Central (a
publisher of open-access journals) maintains a list of such foundations,
\<<http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/apcfaq#grants>\>.

\* Conclusion

If the federal agencies that fund research would put an open-access
condition on their research grants, and allow their research grants to
cover the fees charged by open-access journals, they would greatly
accelerate research in every field affected by government grants.  There
are two ultimate reasons for the government to support open access to
the results of government-funded research.  First, the results of this
research would be made available without further charge to the taxpayers
who paid for it.  Second, the government would increase its \"return on
investment\" by making this research significantly more accessible and
useful. 

Here are a few links to show my interest and background on open-access
issues.

I am the author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm>

I am the editor of Open Access News.

<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html>

I am the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge.

<http://www.publicknowledge.org/projects/open-access.html>

     Sincerely,

     Peter Suber

Peter Suber

Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College

Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge

Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Editor, Open Access News blog

<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/>

peter.suber@earlham.edu

207-326-9482