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PUBLIC ACCESS TO FEDERALLY–FUNDED

RESEARCH

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON INFORMATION POLICY,

CENSUS, AND NATIONAL ARCHIVES

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT

AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

JULY 29, 2010

Serial No. 111–114

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov

http://www.oversight.house.gov

(II)

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York, Chairman

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia

MIKE QUIGLEY, Illinois

MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

HENRY CUELLAR, Texas

PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut

PETER WELCH, Vermont

BILL FOSTER, Illinois

JACKIE SPEIER, California

STEVE DRIEHAUS, Ohio

JUDY CHU, California

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

DAN BURTON, Indiana

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California

JIM JORDAN, Ohio

JEFF FLAKE, Arizona

JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska

JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah

AARON SCHOCK, Illinois

BLAINE LUETKEMEYER, Missouri

ANH ‘‘JOSEPH’’ CAO, Louisiana

BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania

RON STROMAN, Staff Director

MICHAEL MCCARTHY, Deputy Staff Director

CARLA HULTBERG, Chief Clerk

LARRY BRADY, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON INFORMATION POLICY, CENSUS, AND NATIONAL ARCHIVES

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri, Chairman

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

STEVE DRIEHAUS, Ohio

HENRY CUELLAR, Texas

JUDY CHU, California

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah

DARRYL PIGGEE, Staff Director

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on July 29, 2010 ............................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Adler, Allan, vice president, Government and Legal Affairs, Association

of American Publishers; Steven J. Breckler, Ph.D., executive director

for science, American Psychological Association; Ralph Oman, Pravel

professorial lecturer in intellectual property law and fellow, the Creative and Innovative Economy Center, George Washington University

Law School ..................................................................................................... 9

Adler, Allan ................................................................................................ 9

Breckler, Steven J. .................................................................................... 23

Oman, Ralph .............................................................................................. 31

Lipman, David J., M.D., Director, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health,

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ...................................... 132

Roberts, Richard, Ph.D., F.R.S., chief scientific officer, New England

Biolabs; Sharon F. Terry, president and CEO, Genetic Alliance; Elliot

Maxwell, director, Digital Connections Council, Committee for Economic Development; Sophia Colamarino, vice president, research, Autism Speaks; David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs,

Association of Public and Land Grant Universities; and Catherine

Nancarrow, managing editor, Public Library of Science Community

Journals ......................................................................................................... 51

Colamarino, Sophia ................................................................................... 76

Maxwell, Elliot ........................................................................................... 63

Nancarrow, Catherine ............................................................................... 102

Roberts, Richard ........................................................................................ 51

Shulenburger, David ................................................................................. 90

Terry, Sharon F. ........................................................................................ 58

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Adler, Allan, vice president, Government and Legal Affairs, Association

of American Publishers, prepared statement of ......................................... 12

Breckler, Steven J., Ph.D., executive director for science, American Psychological Association, prepared statement of ............................................ 25

Clay, Hon. Wm. Lacy, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Missouri, prepared statement of .................................................................. 3

Colamarino, Sophia, vice president, research, Autism Speaks, prepared

statement of ................................................................................................... 78

Lipman, David J., M.D., Director, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health,

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, prepared statement

of ..................................................................................................................... 135

Maxwell, Elliot, director, Digital Connections Council, Committee for Economic Development, prepared statement of ............................................... 65

Nancarrow, Catherine, managing editor, Public Library of Science Community Journals, prepared statement of .................................................... 104

Oman, Ralph, Pravel professorial lecturer in intellectual property law

and fellow, the Creative and Innovative Economy Center, George Washington University Law School, prepared statement of .............................. 33

Roberts, Richard, Ph.D., F.R.S., chief scientific officer, New England

Biolabs, prepared statement of .................................................................... 53

Shulenburger, David, vice president for academic affairs, Association of

Public and Land Grant Universities, prepared statement of .................... 92

Page

IV

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by—Continued

Terry, Sharon F., president and CEO, Genetic Alliance; Elliot Maxwell,

director, Digital Connections Council, Committee for Economic Development, prepared statement of ........................................................................ 60

(1)

PUBLIC ACCESS TO FEDERALLY–FUNDED

RESEARCH

THURSDAY, JULY 29, 2010

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INFORMATION POLICY, CENSUS, AND

NATIONAL ARCHIVES, COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM, Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 3 p.m., in room

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Wm. Lacy Clay (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Clay, Maloney, Chu, and Chaffetz.

Staff present: Darryl Piggee, staff director/counsel; Yvette

Cravins, counsel; Frank Davis and Anthony Clark, professional

staff members; Charisma Williams, staff assistant; Marc Johnson,

assistant clerk—full committee; Adam Hodge, press secretary—full

committee; Justin LoFranco, minority press assistant and clerk;

and Mark Marin, minority senior professional staff member.

Mr. CLAY. The subcommittee will come to order.

Good afternoon, and welcome to today’s hearing entitled, ‘‘Public

Access to Federally-Funded Research.’’ Without objection, the

chairman and ranking minority member will have 5 minutes to

make opening statements, followed by opening statements not to

exceed 3 minutes by any other Member who seeks recognition. And

without objection, Members and witnesses may have 5 legislative

days to submit a written statement or extraneous materials for the

record.

The purpose of today’s hearing is to examine the current state

of public access to federally funded research and to discuss the potential implications of increased access. Every year, the Federal

Government, using taxpayer dollars, funds tens of billions of dollars in basic and applied research. Most of the funding is concentrated within 11 Federal departments and/or agencies.

So while this is not a legislative hearing attached to any particular bill, there has been much interest, deservedly so, surrounding

this topic on both sides of the issue of how much access should the

public have to federally funded research, how would increased access affect grantees, researchers and scholars.

To that end, I determined that the subcommittee should allow an

atmosphere for dialog and discussion of public access to federally

funded research. It is relevant, current and within the purview of

this subcommittee. So today we will hear testimony from stakeholders in the areas of publishing, science research, education and

patient advocacy.

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This hearing will also examine the operational processes utilized

by the National Institutes of Heath in its open access program, including but not limited to the submission process, data usage, embargo time period and compliance information. We will examine

how the National Institutes of Health has been affected by the congressional mandate to ensure that the public has access to the published results of NIH-funded research no later than 12 months

after publication. What have been the results and ramifications,

positive and negative, of that policy to the stakeholders?

I thank all of our witnesses for appearing today and look forward

to their testimony. I now recognize the distinguished ranking minority member, Mr. Chaffetz of Utah. Mr. Chaffetz.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Wm. Lacy Clay follows:]

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Mr. CHAFFETZ. Thank you, and thanks to the various witnesses

that are here today. We appreciate your flexibility and understanding with all the votes and other hearings and things that are going

on here prior to the recess. I appreciate your patience.

And I appreciate your holding this hearing.

I am looking forward to hearing the exchange from our witnesses. The extraordinary expansion of access to digital information over the past decade has caused heated debate to arise over

the issue of public access to federally funded research results. The

Federal Government funds billions of dollars in research every

year, much of it in the form of grants to researchers.

Typically, researchers write one or more manuscripts detailing

the findings of the research in hopes of having them published as

articles in scientific journals. Journal publishers subject these submitted manuscripts to a vigorous peer-reviewed process to ensure

that the scientific results and conclusions are valid prior to selection for publication.

In exchange for the costs associated with peer review, editing,

publication of the manuscript, the researcher typically assigns his

or her copyright to the journal publisher. Historically, Congress has

directed that federally funded researchers retain expansive intellectual property rights, to encourage the advancement and distribution of scientific knowledge as widely as possible. This system has

proven highly successful in allowing researchers from universities

in the United States and across the world access to new and constantly evolving scientific information from which they can pursue

new discoveries and innovations.

There are now more than 25,000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide, produced by more than 2,000 publishers, ranging from the

well-known, such as Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine to one of my own personal favorites, and I know something

that all good Americans subscribe to, the Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications, which publishes articles of interest to the numerical linear algebra community. You subscribe, don’t you, Mr.

Chairman? [Laughter.]

I will share my copy with you.

In the United States, the scholarly publishing enterprise provides direct employment for roughly 33,000 people.

I am sympathetic to the arguments that proponents of the increased public and free access to federally funded research make

regarding the rights of taxpayers to the results of that research.

They paid for it, and they should be able to access the fruits of that

research.

However, journal publishers invest a significant amount of

money and provide a valuable service to the scientific community

and the Nation in peer-reviewed editing, publication and dissemination of researched articles. According to estimates made by the

publishing community, the National Institutes of Health funded research results in approximately 85,000 journal published articles

annually. By the time a final peer-reviewed manuscript is completed, the point at which NIH requires submission under their

current rules, publishers estimate that they have invested in excess

of $1,400 per article, or roughly $126 million annually.

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I am concerned about the Federal Government mandating free

access policies, such as the current one at NIH, that diminished

copyright protections for private sector journal articles, also particularly with regard to some of the smaller non-profit professional

organizations that publish only one or two journals. I am concerned

about their ability to stay in the publishing game, and their willingness to invest in the vigorous peer-review process that currently

makes our scientific enterprise so vibrant without strong copyright

incentives.

One thing I hope we all keep in mind, there are many alternatives to the type of policy currently employed at the National Institutes of Heath in which H.R. 5037, which has been referred to

this subcommittee, would expand to other Federal research funding

agencies. These alternatives policies would strike an appropriate

balance between the taxpayer access to the results of federally

funded research and the copyright incentives and protections of the

publishers.

For example, in the 2007 America Competes Act, Congress directed the National Science Foundation to develop a system whereby research reports, including readily accessible summary of the

outcomes of the NSF-sponsored research, are disseminated instead

of copyrighted materials for the publishers. Again, it is a complex

issue. There are a variety of directions in which we can go.

And thus, I think the hearing is very appropriate and I look forward to hearing from all of the witnesses today. I appreciate your

preparation. And I assure you, given the schedule, all of the information will be properly reviewed.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Mr. Chaffetz.

If there are no more opening statements, I will now introduce our

first panel. On this panel, we will hear from Mr. Allan Adler. Mr.

Adler is the vice president of Legal and Government Affairs with

the Association of American Publishers. Welcome.

Our next witness will be Dr. Steven Breckler. Dr. Breckler is a

graduate of the University of California at San Diego and received

his masters and Ph.D. from Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous publications and articles in the area of psychology. He has served as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins and

as program director of the National Science Foundation. He is currently the executive director at the American Psychology Association. Thank you for being here.

Our third witness will be Professor Ralph Oman. Mr. Oman

teaches copyright law at the George Washington University Law

School. He also serves as a fellow on the faculty of the Law School’s

Creative and Innovative Economy Center. Mr. Oman served as

chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks. He is a graduate of Hamilton

College in Georgetown University Law Center.

I want to welcome all of you and thank you for being here today.

It is the policy of the subcommittee to swear in all witnesses before

they testify. Would you all please stand and raise your right

hands?

[Witnesses sworn.]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you . You may be seated. Let the record reflect

the witnesses answered in the affirmative.

Each witness will have 5 minutes to make opening statements.

Your complete written testimony will be included in the hearing

record. The lighting system in front of you will indicate how much

time you have left. When it turns red, we would like for you to

cease and desist.

Mr. Adler, you may begin.

STATEMENTS OF ALLAN ADLER, VICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENT AND LEGAL AFFAIRS, ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN

PUBLISHERS; STEVEN J. BRECKLER, PH.D., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOR SCIENCE, AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION; RALPH OMAN, PRAVEL PROFESSORIAL LECTURER

IN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW AND FELLOW, THE CREATIVE AND INNOVATIVE ECONOMY CENTER, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL

STATEMENT OF ALLAN ADLER

Mr. ADLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to participate in this hearing

on behalf of the Association of American Publishers, principal trade

association of the U.S. book publishing industry, whose for-profit

and non-profit members publish books, journals and other literary

works in every field of human interest, both in print and digital

formats.

Relative to today’s hearing, AAP’s membership includes some 50

for-profit companies and non-profit organizations that publish scientific, technical and medical journals in both print and digital formats. Because I have submitted a written statement for the record,

let me just briefly identify a few key points.

First, as we discuss federally funded research, you will hear references to peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly publications

as well as characterizations of those items as the results or products of federally funded research. Such characterizations, however,

are not accurate, and they are particularly misleading in the context of today’s discussion. It is critical that you keep in mind the

distinction between federally funded research and the private sector journal articles that are written by the funded researchers to

report and document that research.

The peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals are not

themselves funded researchers. Nor are they deliverables required

under the terms of the funding grant, as are, for example, the annual progress reports that the research grantees typically require

to submit to the funding agency.

Instead, they are separate reports on the funded research, written with the express intention of publication in relevant peer-reviewed journals to describe and explain the process, findings and

significance of the funded research that has been conducted by the

authoring researchers. These are prepared for publication and ultimately published by peer-reviewed journals without funding from

the Government.

Second, the articles that are published in peer-reviewed journals

are ultimately collaborative products of the researcher and the

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journal publisher, which devotes a substantial amount of its editorial and other publishing resources to ensuring that the final

published version of the researcher’s account is accurate and that

its significance is understood within the context of other research

in the same field or related fields.

Journal publishers invest hundreds of millions of dollars in peer

review, editing and publishing processes, including for sophisticated communications technologies and electronic resources, support personnel and many part and full-time editors. Publishers

manage all stages of the peer-review process from the time the

journal publisher receives a new manuscript until the final version

is accepted for publication as a journal article. Each manuscript

undergoes rigorous review by editors and technical experts prior to

publication in a resource-intensive process that helps ensure the

quality and integrity of these published accounts of scientific research.

Government mandates, like the NIH Public Access Policy, which

requires free online access to the author’s final peer-reviewed

manuscript after acceptance for journal publication, expropriate, or

in simpler terms, take without consideration the substantial investments that the publisher makes in providing added value to the researcher’s original manuscript.

And by doing so, they substantially weaken an area of our economy where the United States has a distinct comparative advantage

over its competitors in global markets. Science and technology publishers based in North America account for some 45 percent of all

peer-reviewed scientific research papers published annually worldwide. For many U.S. journal publishers, over 50 percent of their

revenues come from subscriptions delivered outside U.S. borders.

But through mandates like the NIH policy, the government intervenes to become the de facto publisher of the articles and compete

directly with the journal publisher in making them available for

public access and distribution. Even worse, this unwarranted competition from the Government can lead to further harm to the publishers by facilitating digital piracy, as we have discovered with respect to evidence showing that companies in China are reselling

and distributing these journal articles as downloaded from NIH’s

PubMed central data base without authorization from the publisher.

While some may think such piracy is not the Government’s fault,

the simple reality is that in today’s digitally networked world, the

Government cannot presume to make these copyrighted works freely available online to the U.S. taxpayer without also giving them

away free to the rest of the world, including competing National

governments, public and private institutions, corporations and yes,

pirates, all of whom, with the exception of the pirates, would otherwise probably acquire these works from the journal publisher by

subscription.

If someone can get these articles for free on a Government Web

site, why would they pay to subscribe to journals? Surveys have

shown that a significant number of librarians would be likely to

cancel their institutional subscriptions to journals if the articles

contained in them were accessible online for free, even if the artiVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:19 May 09, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00014 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\KATIES\DOCS\64928.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
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cles were not available for a year, and even if not all the articles

in the journal were available online.

Thus, mandates like the NIH policy also undermine copyright

protection for journal articles, and diminish incentives for publishers to continue making substantial investments in managing the

peer review process and otherwise improving scientific communications and providing and maintaining non-Government public filtered records of federally funded research. Mr. Chairman, there are

better approaches to enhancing public access to the results of federally funded research.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Adler follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you so much for your testimony.

Dr. Breckler, you are recognized for 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF STEVEN J. BRECKLER

Dr. BRECKLER. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, I

am Dr. Steve Breckler, executive director for Science of the American Psychological Association.

APA is the largest scientific and professional association of psychologists in the United States. We are the world’s largest association of psychologists, with over 150,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students as members. APA is also the

largest publisher of behavioral science research, with 56 of the premier scholarly journals in the field of psychology.

The mission of APA is to advance the creation, communication

and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and to

improve people’s lives. APA strongly supports the goal of public access to federally funded research.

What is not clear, however, is the best way to accomplish the

goal. The methods implemented to date, and the ones currently

under most active consideration, do not necessarily represent the

best possible methods. In fact, some carry substantial risk of harming scientific scholarship and actually impeding our ability to accomplish the ultimate goal of enhancing public access to federally

funded research.

As a citizen and as a scientist, I take enormous pride in American science. I think we all do. We are the stewards of the world’s

strongest and most vibrant system of scientific research and scholarship. The last thing that any of us wants to do is to harm or otherwise weaken American science. Our Nation’s most serious investments in science began over 60 years ago. It was recognized then

that the Federal Government was in the best position to provide

the financial resources to support science and research in this

country. It was also recognized then that the private sector and the

non-profit scholarly societies were in the best position to manage

the publication and dissemination of research results in this country.

The Federal Government did not want to get into the scholarly

publishing business, nor did society demand it. Indeed, it has always been the opposite, of maintaining a separation between the

Government and the final production of scholarship, of protecting

academic freedom and allowing scholars in this country to do their

work without Government interference. The success of American

science can be traced to this formula, to this division of responsibility and management of the scientific enterprise. It has served us

extremely well.

And now for a variety of reasons that really have nothing to do

with scientific achievement and advancement, some among us want

to change the formula. Change can be a good thing. But it should

be well-reasoned and thoroughly researched before wholesale implementation. A mistake could mean irreparable damage, an outcome that none of us wants.

I have provided detail in our written testimony about some of the

potential risk of poorly developed public access policies. Scholarly

publishers add tremendous value to the communication and disVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:19 May 09, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00027 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\KATIES\DOCS\64928.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
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semination of science. And we invest enormous resources in the

process. Yet the current public misunderstanding is that those

costs are either inconsequential or that the Government already

bears those costs. Neither is true.

Alternative models for public access exist. NSF, for example, requires its investigators to submit their final project reports and citations to published research documents resulting from their research for posting on the NSF public Web site. This is consistent

with the fact that taxpayers are paying for the research results, not

for the publications.

APA suggests that the current situation offers the opportunity to

conduct a natural experiment to evaluate the various public access

models currently in place. This opportunity was recognized by

OSTP when it noted in late 2009 that the NIH model has a variety

of features that can be evaluated, and there are other ways to offer

the public enhanced access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications.

Indeed, in its implementation of a public access policy, NIH assumes that 12 months provides a sufficient embargo period to allow

publishers enough time to recoup their investment. Yet as the data

we provided in our written testimony demonstrates, 12 months is

clearly too short a time for many publishers, especially those in the

social and behavioral sciences, to recover even a fraction of their

investments. In APA’s experience, less than 16 percent of the ultimate usage of a journal article occurs within the first 12 months

of publication.

We can do better. We need to bring all stakeholders to the table

to develop a viable system of public access, one that makes federally funded research accessible to the public, but without sacrificing or harming the various scientific infrastructure supported by

the Federal Government and desired by the public. This was the

recommendation of the OSTP scholarly publishing roundtable, and

it is the basis for the provision of the COMPETES bill currently

working its way through Congress to establish an interagency

working group on public access.

APA supports these recommendations, but we emphasize the

need to include the perspective of scientific societies that publish

social and behavioral science research. When it comes to policies

surrounding public access to federally funded research, we must be

thoughtful and careful and willing to take the time and make the

effort to do it right. Otherwise, we run the real risk of reducing,

rather than increasing, public access to federally funded research

and of causing long-term to America’s science and technology infrastructure.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Breckler follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you so much, Dr. Breckler, for your testimony.

Professor Oman, you may proceed.

STATEMENT OF RALPH OMAN

Mr. OMAN. It is a great honor to be here today. Mr. Chairman,

I am not necessarily a stakeholder here. I am appearing as the

former Register of Copyrights of the United States. I, as always,

represent the public interest.

I don’t represent any of the parties. But like an old fire horse,

I hear the bells ring and I am off and running to protect the U.S.

copyright system.

I am concerned that the new public access proposals that we

have before us will in fact weaken the commercial market for scientific, technical and medical journals. If the publishers of these

journals eventually get out of business because they can’t make it

pay, we will lose a very valuable tool for scientific advance. If sales

plummet, how can the publishers continue to publish? I suppose

that is the issue that we have to answer today, whether or not that

dire prediction will in fact come true.

I urge Congress to develop a public access policy that respects

the spirit of the copyright law. The patent and copyright clause of

the Constitution urges Congress ‘‘to promote the progress of science

and the useful arts.’’ Summarizing the rest of the provision, ‘‘by

giving authors and publishers an exclusive right in their writings.’’

With that powerful incentive direct from the Constitution to commercialize their journals, the publishers will reach as broad an audience as possible for these important publications.

The tension between authors and inventors who benefit from

Government research grants on the one hand and the advocates of

Government ownership of the fruits of that research on the other

has been with us for a long time. I worked on the Bayh-Dole legislation back in 1980 for my old boss, Senator Mathias of Maryland.

In that debate over patent policy in 1980, Senator Russell Long of

Louisiana argued that any patents developed with Government research funds should be owned by the Government. In his inimitable

style, he thundered, ‘‘We paid for it, we own it.’’

Senator Bayh and Senator Dole reasoned that the taxpayers

would get a far greater return on investment if we instead facilitated private sector ownership and commercialization of these patents, putting the inventions to work for the American people, creating jobs and helping American competitiveness. They won that argument and the Small Business and University Patent Procedure

Act has given American innovation a big boost around the world.

The same policy arguments apply here, Mr. Chairman. For all

the reasons mentioned by Mr. Adler and Dr. Breckler, I do not

think that the Government should get deeply involved in scholarly

publishing. It is a bad for a free enterprise economy with our tradition of free speech. With normal copyright protection, the private

sector publishers will run the peer-review process, they will select

the articles, they will aggressively market those publications to corporations, to libraries, to research institutions. That is the American way. A broad, free public access policy is an unfortunate precedent for a country like the United States whose great strength in

foreign markets is intellectual property.

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I spent more than 8 years of my life as Register of Copyrights,

fighting to protect American authors and publishers from foreign

pirates. I find it a little strange today that Congress may now decide to give away some of that intellectual property free of charge.

The pirates must feel vindicated.

There is a huge foreign commercial market for these publications

and a free access policy would cost the United States millions of

dollars that we now get from rich foreign governments and large

foreign corporations. As Senator Mathias, my old boss, once said,

‘‘talk about Uncle Sap.’’ It is like standing on the coastline and

shoveling buckets of greenbacks into the ocean. We are the only

country, as far as I know, to have such a give it away for nothing

policy.

I hope Congress will give the evolving digital marketplace a

chance to come to grips with the new online technologies without

undercutting the incentives that publishers have relied on for 200

years. We all have compassion for the parent of a sick child with

a rare disease, wanting to have quick and easy access to articles

explaining the latest state-of-the-art therapies. Let’s solve that

problem of patient access without doing damage to the incentives

provided by copyright. Let’s all sit down and reason together and

figure out how to get the job done.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Oman follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Professor Oman. And we will now move

to the question period for Members and proceed under the 5-

minute rule. We will begin with Mr. Chaffetz for 5 minutes.

Mr. CHAFFETZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it.

One of the things we are looking at is H.R. 5037. And one of the

things that would happen under that piece of legislation is that it

would shorten the time, the embargo time, from 12 months to 6

months. Can you give me a sense of the impact that you would see

of moving from 12 months to 6 months? I will give you a brief time,

but I only have 5 minutes, so I have to go swiftly. We will start

with Mr. Adler.

Mr. ADLER. Congressman, the fact of the matter is, we have argued all along, there is no one size fits all embargo period that will

make sense in journal publishing across the diverse economic models that exist for publishers. What might work with respect to a

large commercial publisher doesn’t necessarily work with a not-forprofit society publisher or a patient advocacy organization which

publishes a journal not so much in the same way that a large commercial publisher would looking for profits, but simply to help generate additional funds to support some of its other patient advocacy

activities.

So the situation here is that if you have a journal that publishes

on a schedule that is quarterly, annual, as opposed to one that publishes every month, the idea that an embargo of 6 months is going

to work adequately for all of them simply makes no economic

sense.

Dr. BRECKLER. That is correct. In the case of social and behavioral science, where the shelf life of new articles is actually quite

long, much longer than in other fields of science, we have suggested on the basis of our data that 12 months is too short, 6

months would probably be devastating. It would hurt the circulation of the journal articles, and it would also create a perverse, sort

of unfair advantage for federally funded research.

We pride ourselves at APA journals in publishing a substantial

number of articles that are not funded by the Federal Government.

It is a wonderful thing. It encourages scholarship and it increases

productivity. But if you put journal articles out there for free, in

6 months it creates a disincentive for people to purchase the journals, and it drives down the ability for non-funded investigators to

get their work published and to be seen.

Mr. CHAFFETZ. Professor Oman.

Mr. OMAN. The incentives to publication are weakened considerably by the 12-month publication requirement. Six months would

effectively destroy the market for those journals, in my opinion.

Mr. CHAFFETZ. One of the more compelling arguments for increased public access are these patient groups. You touched on it

at the end of your testimony, Professor. How do you address that?

What is the answer to that? How do you go back to these patient

groups and say, look, we want to get this information as swiftly as

possible, I don’t care what your financial model is, we have to save

lives here?

Maybe Dr. Breckler, we could start with you and then Mr. Adler.

Dr. BRECKLER. That is absolutely correct. We have maintained

all along that we would like to sit down with all of the stakeholders

39

and work out a viable system for everybody, rather than having the

Federal Government mandate one particular model that happens to

be in favor of one particular——

Mr. CHAFFETZ. I guess that is the issue. If there is something we

could get everybody to agree on, I would like to see that. But is

there any, is there progress toward that? Is there any suggestion

of that? Is there anything that has come close to that?

Dr. BRECKLER. Absolutely. The publishers are already, have always been at the leading edge of innovation in these kinds of

things and are working with all kinds of groups to make available

the relevant articles, to put them in repositories, to identify the

ones ahead of time that are of greatest relevance, to do all kinds

of things to increase the accessibility and availability of them.

Mr. CHAFFETZ. Mr. Adler.

Mr. ADLER. That is correct, Congressman. The publishers have

been working with patient advocacy organizations in the past few

years, for example, to create something called Patient Inform,

which is an online service that provides patients and their caregivers access to some of the most up to date reliable research about

the diagnosis and treatment of specific diseases, and does so at no

cost to them.

Patient Inform also helps to interpret the research and provides

access to additional, more easily comprehended materials that help

explain diagnosis and treatment. At the same time, many publishers individually have their own programs for providing access to

patients, including walk-in clauses, as they are called, in their licenses, that enable libraries that subscribe to their journals to give

any member of the public free electronic onsite access to those journal articles.

Mr. CHAFFETZ. Thank you all. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you.

I now recognize the gentlewoman from California, Ms. Chu, for

5 minutes.

Ms. CHU. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Dr. Oman, in your testimony you wondered if the Government

will commandeer the rights of creative pre-existing materials that

submitted articles may contain. I have three questions about that.

First, how often do articles contain materials that the researcher

does not already own? And second, do publishers always clear these

rights for the author? And third, why would publishers not continue to provide this service under an open access policy?

Mr. OMAN. I think they would continue to provide those services

if they were still in business and could make a go of it commercially. The danger is, of course, that they won’t remain in business

and they won’t be available to make those valuable services in

polishing and shaping and preparing the article for public dissemination.

I probably should defer to the publishers on that point. But it is

my view that the system that we have now in terms of giving copyrights to the authors, to the publishers, is the best way of encouraging the dissemination of this material and having those valuable

services added on to the raw manuscript that is produced by the

Government-funded researcher.

40

Dr. BRECKLER. If I can respond also, I am not in the publishing

end of APA, but I do know enough about how things work. That

is an example of the kind of value added to scientific publications,

to check those things and to give credit where credit is due. It

takes time, it takes staff. It takes work to do that. It takes money

to do that and to do it well.

It is just another example of the many, many things that consume resources to bring to the market high quality scientific publications. That is the kind of thing—APA wouldn’t publish articles

without checking those kinds of things and taking care of those

kinds of things, ever. But we have to take into account the economic reality of what it costs to do that.

Ms. CHU. Dr. Breckler, in fact, I wanted to ask about APA, as

a psychologist myself, and former member of the American Psychological Association, I understand that our field is different from

other scientific research disciplines. Can you explain how the NIH

public access model uniquely affects psychology compared to other

disciplines? I know in your testimony you talk about 15 percent of

lifetime use occurs in the first year. I wonder if that is unique to

our discipline or whether it is similar to other ones.

Dr. BRECKLER. Sure, a couple of comments. We don’t have ready

access to the data from other disciplines, so we can’t really speak

for them. But we thought a lot about what those data mean and

why it is that the uptake is spread over such a long period of time.

I think it has something to do with the nature of the publications

and how focused those publications are. Are they little, incremental

advances in very technical areas, which is common in some fields

of science? Or are they big, sweeping things that take years to develop and have years of impact and so on.

The social and behavioral sciences probably fall into that latter

category most of the time. They are not small, incremental, technical answers to small, technical questions. They tend to be much

broader in scope, which would also be true in other areas of social

and behavioral science. So the risk in the context of NIH, of course,

is that NIH funds areas of science across the board. They fund

physics and chemistry and microbiology, in addition to psychology

and sociology and anthropology and other fields.

So to put them all in the same basket and to assume that they

all have the same models and the same processes and the same

outcomes and so on is a terrible mistake.

Ms. CHU. Mr. Adler, I can definitely understand the concerns of

publishers about the significant investments that you have made in

reviewing, accepting and publishing scientific journal articles. The

numbers are not trivial. However, what I also know is that without

the American taxpayer, who funded the research, you wouldn’t be

able to publish such articles. Which is more important, the publisher’s investment or the taxpayers who have paid more than $60 billion annually in just biomedical research alone?

Mr. ADLER. I don’t believe there is an either/or choice there. The

fact of the matter is that to say that publishers have an advantage

because they are able to publish materials that are about something that the Government has funded, well, in our country we

hope that publishers always, whether they are newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, book or journal publishers, will be able

41

to publish about the activities of the U.S. Government and not feel

that they owe a bill to the U.S. Government for the right to do so.

In this case, we are trying to distinguish very clearly between

the Federal research, the research activity which the Government

does fund, and then the subsequent account of that research by the

researchers, describing and explaining the research activity which

the Government doesn’t generally fund. The publisher funds that.

So we think that there is a natural relationship here. It is one

that has existed for years. Frankly, it wasn’t until the advent of

digital network technology allowed for the ability of this type of

material to be so easily accessible and to be so distributed so quickly around the world that anyone even second guessed whether or

not there was a problem in that relationship.

Ms. CHU. Thank you. I see my time is up, and I yield back.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you, and I thank the gentlewoman from California.

The gentlewoman from New York, Mrs. Maloney, is recognized

for 5 minutes.

Mrs. MALONEY. I thank the chairman for having this hearing. I

think it is an important one, and I think it raises a great deal of

important problems and challenges for the 21st century. Certainly,

patients dealing with an illness or their families certainly want to

know as much as they possibly can about the illness and to have

all the valuable research so that they can know what is happening.

And at the same time, the Federal Government, the taxpayers

have invested in this research and it is intellectual property that

belongs to the United States. And the copyrights belong to the Untied States. And the publishers have invested in it. So it is an

American product that if you open it up to everyone, meaning patients, but also I would say Vietnam, China, the entire world, that

would like to take this information and immediately use it for their

own purposes.

I feel that one of the challenges that we have as a government

for our people and for our taxpayers and for our future is how we

hold on to our intellectual property. That is the one thing that we

continue to produce that is incredibly valuable. But if everything

we produce is immediately made available to the entire world, so

that American workers, American companies, cannot take advantage of it, then we are going to be economically disadvantaged to

a greater way.

I think that what I would like to ask all of the panelists, and I

will begin with Mr. Adler and then go down to Mr. Breckler and

Professor Oman, is I think that we need to take another step, not

only to protect, to protect the intellectual property. You are talking

about publishers, but it goes broader than publishers. It is intellectual property.

We should have a way that we can let American citizens read

about information on the latest research on diseases in a way they

can understand it. As one whose father died of Parkinson’s, I was

reading everything I could find on Parkinson’s. There is a great

deal of research done on Parkinson’s. And reading these scientific

documents, for someone who is not a scientist and not a doctor, it

is very difficult.

42

So I think you have a two-pronged approach; No. 1, to put the

information in a form that the American public can understand

and that is usable. But at the same time, if we don’t protect our

intellectual property, then I fear for the future of our country, quite

frankly.

Another item, we are talking about taxpayer-researched projects.

But we also have a great deal of investment from the private sector

that goes into the latest research that patients should have access

to. But also, I represent a research industry, I represent major

drug companies, major hospitals that do research. And they have

basically told me, if we can’t control our intellectual property, they

are not going to continue investing in this.

So I think that, and we cannot afford, as a country that now has

a huge deficit and a huge debt, we can’t afford to keep spending,

yet the strength of our country is research. We need to continue investing in research, but we have to hold that research. Otherwise,

it is really detrimental to us. We pay for everything and then within 24 hours, other countries feel like, ‘‘well, why should I ever do

any research? I can just steal it from America.’’

I think that we need to take another step, legislatively or in

some way, with the executive orders, to protect this intellectual

property. Otherwise, the private sector is not going to do it. Publishers aren’t going to publish it if they can’t get some profit out

of it. We are a profit company. Unless we want to have Government doing everything, which we can’t afford to do, we face a new,

innovative approach, a problem that we need a new solution to,

where we can allow patients and their families to learn about

things.

But we have to protect our intellectual property. And if we don’t,

then the private investment is not going to be there, whether it is

a research facility or a publisher or whatever. So we need to have

incentives for the private sector to be involved. And we also have

the challenge of how do we get this out to the public that are

Americans, not to pirates who then are going to sell it or produce

it.

I think that is a huge challenge for the future of research in this

country. And if you look at it, what has made this country great,

I would say it is our research and our intellectual property. But if

we can’t hold on to our intellectual property, then I fear for the economic future, quite frankly, of American workers.

So I think there is a huge challenge here, and I would like to

start with Mr. Adler and go down the line and see if you have any

answers to it. How can we make information available that is, and

user-friendly to patients and their families, but at the same time

protect the intellectual property so that pirates don’t use it and

that the incentive is there for private investment, private research,

private publishing? If publishers can’t get something out of it, they

are no longer going to publish it, then the Government has to publish it.

And quite frankly, what we are being told is ways to save money.

So I just throw that out to our panelists and see if you have any

creative ideas of how to approach this.

Mr. ADLER. Well, Congresswoman, on this particular issue, there

is a piece of legislation that has been introduced and is pending in

43

the House Judiciary Committee by Chairman John Conyers, as you

may know, called the Fair Copyright and Research Works Act.

What that legislation would simply——

Mrs. MALONEY. What number is that? Do you have it, the number of that bill? I can look it up, never mind.

Mr. ADLER. I am not sure.

Mrs. MALONEY. What does the bill do?

Mr. ADLER. What the bill basically would say is that if you were

dealing with research funding for a particular project, where part

of the funding comes from someone other than the Federal Government, and you are talking about extrinsic products, things that are

derived from that research, or as you characterize it, are about that

research that also have substantial added value coming from people other than someone who is contracted with the Government

and been funded by the government as part of the research grant,

then the Government would not be permitted to take the type of

position that has been taken by the NIH under its policy of saying

that the Government agency, because it funded the research, now

has the right to distribute these articles that simply describe and

explain the research, which were not funded by the Government

agency, but can be distributed by the Government agency in competition with the publisher, based solely on the fact that the Government funded the research activity.

We think that piece of legislation would not interfere with research funding activities by the Government. It would only make

the Government make decisions about when it is appropriate for

the Government to decide that the research that it is funding is intended to derive specific products and results that only the Government will be able to control. As opposed to allowing the kind of information which comes out of this research, most of which, after

all, is factual, it is not even subject to copyright protection, to be

utilized by anyone that wants to be able to either make a living

by publishing reports and accounts of this research or by explaining the research, whether as a reporter on a science beat for a

newspaper or any other basis of disseminating this information.

We also think that, we have been talking with a U.S. trade representative and the Commerce Department about the fact that as

they go around the world and engage in bilateral negotiations with

many of our trading partners and try to make sure that U.S. intellectual property is protected under those agreements, that they

take a look at what the Government is doing in this instance and

see whether in fact this goes completely against the general tenor

of what this administration has been trying to accomplish through

such efforts.

Mrs. MALONEY. Thank you.

Mr. Breckler.

Dr. BRECKLER. Thank you.

The concept of intellectual property is an interesting thing in the

scientific and research community. And generally I think it is safe

to say that scientists and researchers want their work to be read,

they want it to be seen as broadly as possible, the more the

merrier. So they don’t want impediments to the ability for their

work to get out there around the world. I think that is generally

true globally.

44

But what scientists and researchers do want is mainly three

things I think. One is that they want to retain credit for their intellectual work. They want to be given credit and be cited for their

work, and they don’t want it republished under somebody else’s

name and so on. So they want that kind of thing.

The second thing is that they want to control the fate of their

work, the fate of their publications. And the third, and this is the

most important thing for the purpose of this discussion, is that

they rely on a signaling mechanism that helps to sort out the really

good work from the less good work. I won’t call it poor work. They

need a signaling mechanism that says, this is a good article, this

is a quality piece of intellectual property, we should pay attention

to it.

And it is precisely that signaling mechanism that the publishing

industry provides through peer review and rigorous selection of articles for publication, we know that in our high quality prestige

journals, which are the ones that we are talking about here, if you

have an article there, it means something important.

How many of us have children now, or grandchildren, and we

spend a lot of time trying to teach them how to sort through what

means something and what doesn’t mean something on the Internet? It is hard to tell. There are few signaling mechanisms. Because it all looks legitimate.

What the scholarly publishers bring to the table is legitimacy to

the process. Anything that destroys that legitimacy is a loss for

science.

Mrs. MALONEY. Yes, Professor? Any comments, Professor?

Mr. OMAN. After your stirring endorsement of the virtues and

values of intellectual property, I have nothing to add. Thank you.

Mr. CLAY. The gentlewoman’s time has expired.

Let me go to Mr. Adler. To recoup costs, have the publishers considered offering access to titles and charge a nominal fee for

downloading the full article? Much like music and movie Web sites.

Mr. ADLER. Certainly. That is within the purview of every publisher, whether it is a for-profit or not-for-profit, to consider in

terms of its own business model. And that is exactly the way the

system should work.

What we are talking about here is whether the Government

should be putting its thumb on the scale and essentially coercing

a particular business model because the Government believes that

in doing so, it is enhancing the ability of the public to learn about

research that the Government has funded as if there was no other

way for that to be accomplished.

There is nothing that prevents the funding agencies from releasing, for example, the annual progress reports that the funded researchers are required to provide to the funding agency. There is

nothing preventing these agencies from having staff people who

help to translate into common layman’s English what the import

of funded research is.

And in an agency like the NIH, for example, which is perhaps

the most well-funded of all science research agencies in the world,

they certainly have ample resources to find other ways of informing

the public about the importance of the research they funded than

45

by competing directly with journal publishers, using a version of

the journal publisher’s own acquired articles.

Mr. CLAY. Now, do you or any of the other panelists have any

data on how a publisher would go out of business as a result of increased access? Anybody? Any data compiled on that?

Mr. ADLER. It is difficult, Mr. Chairman, to get data about that.

Because again, this isn’t shutting down publication by these publishers completely. What it is doing is it is making it difficult for

them to recover some of the investment they make in certain articles, for which part of that investment gets apportioned. Because

those articles happen to be the ones that are funded by the Government agency and subject to this type of policy.

The real question that needs to be asked though is, is there any

substantial deficit in the public’s ability to learn about important

research that is funded by the Federal Government. We in the publishing community don’t believe there is. And if there is a deficit,

it is simply due to inaction by the Government to take any number

of courses that it could take to provide alternative ways for the

public to learn about and understand what kind of scientific research the Government is funding.

Mr. CLAY. And along those same lines of questioning, and I guess

we will ask Professor Oman this one, if the NIH policy conditions

its grants of funding upon the researchers’s agreement to make

publicly available the article in 1 year, where is the copyright

issue? Can’t the researchers choose another avenue and not accept

the NIH funding?

Mr. OMAN. It is really a difficult choice for the researchers. Obviously, professionally, a grant from the NIH is a very prestigious

achievement. And if the author and the publisher have to dedicate

their publication or the manuscript, anyway, to the public domain,

that in their view probably would be a small price to pay.

But if ultimately what happened is this prestigious journal that

they were so proud to get published in had to shut down and go

out of business, maybe they would have second thoughts about

abandoning their copyright in exchange for the money.

Mr. CLAY. Let me ask, to help me understand better, are the

edits or additional texts written by the publishers after peer review

or the grantees?

Mr. OMAN. I should defer to the publishing representatives. But

my understanding is that in fact, it is a continuing process. The

publishers are involved with the author from the beginning in

terms of giving them ideas, suggesting improvements to the text,

consulting with other experts. They have experts on their own

staff. And they do the formal peer review and then help the author

incorporate those suggested improvements into the manuscript. So

it is a continuing process.

Mr. CLAY. So throughout the process, then, they get a copyrightable attribute?

Mr. OMAN. Yes. They make a copyrightable contribution to the

authorship, which is protected by copyright.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you.

Is that how you view it, Dr. Breckler?

Dr. BRECKLER. Yes, that is correct. And if I can clarify, the concept of grants, which is what most of the external funding at NIH

46

and NSF and some of the other agencies is about, is designed to

create an incentive and a motivation for the researchers and the

scientists to take ownership of their ideas and their thoughts and

the results of the research.

The intellectual work that goes into publications belongs to that

scientist. It does not belong to the Federal Government. That is the

whole spirit of a grant. And it is one of the reasons why science

in this country thrives, why it is so successful. These aren’t necessarily contracts or works for hire. The whole scientific research

system works this way, and it spurs creativity and rapid advancements and so on.

So the intellectual property really is vested in the investigator,

not in the granting agency.

Mr. CLAY. Have you considered a business model wherein the

publisher charges the author a fee for publishing and what would

be the positives and negatives of such a model?

Mr. ADLER. There are many publishers that do utilize that

model. Some of them use it in conjunction with other models. They

still continue to obtain revenue through subscribership at the cost

and charges to the end user of the material.

The fact of the matter is that if you are going to be basing it,

your ability to recover your investments and continue to make investments on whether or not the authors who bring you manuscripts are going to be able to pay for the $4,000 which roughly

goes into the processing and handling of every article that is published by a peer-reviewed journal, you are going to have to be sure

that those authors come to you with the wherewithal to be able to

afford that.

The publishers really don’t necessarily want to see authors being

constrained and have to use either part of the money that they

could otherwise use for research or have to go some place else to

find additional money in order to get these articles published. We

believe that having the people who make use of these articles, particularly when many of those readers are, as we have suggested to

you, corporate institutions that use it for their own commercial research and their own products and services, or national governments, or health-related institutions that use it in furtherance of

their own missions, we don’t see why those end users shouldn’t ultimately have to pay for that use.

Mr. CLAY. A final question. What timeframe would be an acceptable embargo time period in order for publishers to recoup their investment? Anyone on the panel can take a stab at it.

Mr. ADLER. As I said to you before, Mr. Chairman, we honestly

believe that after discussing this, and this discussion has now gone

on for a number of years since the NIH first proposed its public access policy as a voluntary policy, that there simply is no single

standard that can apply across the board to all of the different

business models and commercial and not-for-profit publishers in

this field. Each one of them has to determine, with respect to their

own investments, their own publishing schedules, their own need,

to utilize fees and subscription fees that come in from these, to continue their publishing activities, in order for them to decide what

would be an appropriate embargo period.

47

The real question to ask is, is that an appropriate task for the

Government, to be determining what an embargo period should be

before this material, which is under copyright, transferred by the

author to the publisher, now gets to be made freely available

around the world by someone else.

Mrs. MALONEY. May I ask another question?

Mr. CLAY. Yes, let me just see, does Dr. Breckler, do you have

an opinion about embargo time period?

Dr. BRECKLER. What Mr. Adler said is correct. I think ultimately,

if everybody could agree to come to the table and discuss this, we

could agree on some methods for determining what the appropriate

embargo period would be. This is one of the reasons APA is looking

at its own journal, so that we can make a determination of what

a fair embargo period would be.

Mr. CLAY. So each Federal agency could decide that a different

embargo time period?

Dr. BRECKLER. What I would suggest is that the variables that

will determine that is more than just what the agency is or what

the agency happens to fund. Because it depends a lot also on the

particular discipline of funding. NSF funds things from physics to

social psychology. It depends on the format of the journal and so

on.

Mr. CLAY. Professor, any comment?

Mr. OMAN. I just wanted to add that perhaps a blanket approach

isn’t necessarily the best approach. You might want to have immediate access for patient access for people who are private citizens,

who are looking for an answer to a question at 3 a.m., when their

child is ill, and a normal copyright protection for the rest of the

world. I think the system can be nuanced enough with digital technology to achieve that purpose without destroying the fabric of

copyright.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you. Thank you all for your responses.

Mrs. Maloney, you are recognized.

Mrs. MALONEY. Thank you. I think that is an interesting statement, Professor Oman. But I don’t know how you could protect the

copyright. Because someone could just log in through a friend and

have it.

I would like to frame another question. I have strongly supported

a citizen’s right to Government information. In fact, I am very

proud of having authored the Electronic Freedom of Information

Act of 1996. It was probably the biggest access to Federal archives

and Federal information and required it electronically. I probably

have gotten more awards as a visionary legislator on that piece of

legislation that allows the public to have access to this information.

I also authored the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which was

the largest unveiling of CIA documents probably in history.

But I am concerned that in looking at the issue of public access

to federally funded research, we have to be careful to protect the

intellectual property, particularly since we live in such a competitive world. At one time, we were competing with another State or

another business. Now we are competing with China, India, Vietnam and who knows, another emerging country that may emerge

soon.

48

So we are competing with jobs and in every way. I think that we

as a Government need to protect the taxpayer dollars in this research. And a scientific publisher likewise, whether it is for-profit

or non-profit, or even a Government publisher, has the right to protect their work product. We need to be careful as we look at this

issue. I think it is a very complicated one. And I think we need

even more of an answer than Mr. Conyers has put forward, as explained to me by Mr. Adler.

I would say that some proponents of public access to federally

funded research call for putting a final manuscript online immediately. Some say 6 months, some say after it is accepted for publication. But this article, in many ways, goes far beyond federally

funded. As one who just recently wrote a book, it is not that easy.

You present a manuscript, your editors look at it, everybody comments in the world on it, they refine it, they take time to look at

this.

So what finally is printed is not, at least in the case of my book,

there were a lot of hands going into it and suggesting it could be

done in a clearer way, a better way, and why didn’t you add this

and add that. I would say that is the way all publishing is, whether

scientific or a book or whatever. You have publishers, you have researchers, you have fact checkers. They are not going to print anything, they have to fact check it and make sure it is accurate. They

have to send it out and have all these other scientists say, you are

right or you are wrong, or it is crazy or it is innovative, or it needs

more research.

So the point I am making, that it is a product that has been

worked on. And we don’t want to take that aspect out of the economic chain. If you take that out, you are not going to get the good

peer-reviewed, fact-checked article. I mean, you and I can go on the

Internet tomorrow and publish whatever we want. Here is my scientific study on whatever, on what I think is the cure for cancer.

I could go home tonight, write my paper and print it on the Internet tomorrow. No one would read it, I am sure.

But the point I am trying to make is that anyone can publish

anything now, particularly. But when it comes out of a peer-reviewed publication, it is scientific. Other scientists have spent time,

and they probably pay them, I don’t know, to read it and say, ‘‘this

is accurate,’’ ‘‘this is wrong,’’ ‘‘I think it is valuable,’’ ‘‘I think it is

not valuable.’’ So in other words, it is an expensive process that

gives value added to scientific research in our country.

The point I am trying to make is that I don’t think we want to

take that out of our country. Because if you take that out and don’t

allow someone to make a profit, they are not going to do it. I just

came from a financial services meeting, and one of my bills, they

always want everything to be free. I always argue that people have

to make a profit or cover their expenses, or they are not going to

do it. Whether it is your ATM fees, one of my bills was just letting

consumers know there is an ATM fee, and then you decide whether

it is worth your time to pay a dollar to get your money at the spot.

But the point is, publishers aren’t going to do peer-reviewed research, publish it in the first place, unless they are entitled to have

some type of profit or at least pay their expenses. They have to pay

people to look at these things. They have to pay fact checkers.

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When a publisher prints something, they have fact checked everything in it and paid someone to do it. Maybe for months, who

knows. Depends how complicated it is.

So I think there are many levels that we don’t want to disrupt

scientific research in our country. It is probably the most valuable

commodity that we have. Not only do we want it published and

peer-reviewed, but in my opinion, I think we have to be careful

about protecting the intellectual property in order to be competitive

in the world financial markets. If everything that we discover we

are going to immediately give to every other country, then they are

not going to be investing in research. They will say, ‘‘let America

invest billions in research,’’ and they will be publishing it the next

day that something is peer-reviewed and accurate, and then we can

grab it and produce it quickly and undercut them and they won’t

make any money off their research.

If that starts happening, the private sector certainly is not going

to invest in research. And you will have Members of Congress saying, ‘‘why are we bothering with this research that is immediately

being sent to another country?’’

So I think that we really have a huge problem ahead of us on

how we protect our copyright and protect our intellectual property

for us to be able to compete and win economically. That is how serious I think it is.

Then also, we need to protect the publishers. Otherwise, they are

not going to be doing peer reviews. They are not going to be investing in fact checkers. Why should they? They won’t make any profit.

So I think we have a challenge where we don’t want to kill, you

get the point. Now, does anybody have any answers? I certainly

don’t. But I do know that we have a challenge in front of us. And

I think it is a serious one, if we want to compete and win in the

world economy and hold on to our scientific research.

And let me add something else. You say that all of these scientists want their product to be read and they want their name on

it. Well, no one is going to read their product unless it is published

and fact-checked and peer reviewed. That takes money. All of us

can write a thesis tonight and throw it on the Internet. Doesn’t

mean anyone is going to read it. But if it comes out of the so and

so review scientific panel of NIH or whatever, then everybody is

going to look at it and say, hey, this is important.

I am very interested in women’s health, and then I will be quiet

on this. I subscribe to certain publishers on women’s health, because that is one of the fields that I invest my time in. Certain

ones, people mail me, I wake up every morning, there are documents on my front door on women’s health.

But the ones I really pay attention to are the ones that are published by respected publishers and scientific communities that I

know have been fact-checked, peer-reviewed, tested, tested on rats,

tested on people, and that it is really scientifically pure. But that

takes money to do it. And I don’t think we want to take that out

of our system. I think we are going to have a big problem on anybody doing it.

And then also, I am very concerned about our competitiveness in

the world economy. We have not done a good job in protecting, we

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portant scientific research. It is a big issue, Mr. Chairman. You

walked into a big issue.

Mr. CLAY. It is.

Mrs. MALONEY. You always do. He always does.

Mr. CLAY. I appreciate your involvement in this hearing.

The gentlewoman’s time has expired, and this panel is excused.

We will now ask for the second panel to come up and take your

seats. I will now introduce our second panel. On this panel we will

hear from Dr. Richard Roberts. Dr. Roberts is the chief scientific

officer at New England Biolabs. Dr. Roberts was formally educated

in England. His post-doctoral research was completed at Harvard.

He is the author of numerous articles and holds several patents.

Dr. Roberts is also the 1993 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in

physiology and medicine for the discovery of split genes. Welcome.

Next, we have Ms. Sharon Terry. Ms. Terry is the president and

CEO of Genetic Alliance, a network promoting openness and centered on the health of individuals, families and communities. Ms.

Terry, a former college chaplain, and her husband founded and

built an organization that enables ethical research and policies,

and provides support and information to Members and the public.

In 2009, she received a Research America distinguished organization advocacy award. Ms. Terry also has an honorary doctorate

from Iona College. Welcome to the committee, Ms. Terry.

Next we have Mr. Elliott Maxwell. Mr. Maxwell is a graduate of

Brown University and received his law degree from Yale. He is a

former Department of Commerce official, specializing in international technology policy, technology administration as well as

digital economy. He served as a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute. He currently advises on the intersection of business, technology and public policy and electronic commerce and telecommunications. Welcome to you.

Next we have Professor Sophia Colamarino, a graduate of Stanford and the University of California San Francisco. After 16 years

of laboratory research experience, Sophia joined Cure Autism Now

in November 2004, as science director. After receiving her Ph.D.,

Professor Colamarino conducted research on genetic disorders in

Milan, Italy. Sophia’s extensive research has been included in

many publications, in addition to her work in Autism Speaks. She

is also a consulting associate and professor in the Department of

Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Welcome to you.

Next we will hear from Dr. David Shulenburger. Dr.

Shulenburger is a graduate of the University of Illinois, receiving

a master’s degree and a Ph.D. He is the author of numerous articles and publications. Dr. Shulenburger was recently the executive

vice chancellor and provost at the University of Kansas. He is currently the vice president of Academic Affairs at the Association of

Public and Land Grant Universities. Welcome.

Our final witness on this panel will be Ms. Catherine Nancarrow.

Ms. Nancarrow came to the Public Library of Science Community

Journals in January 2005 to coordinate the editorial production

Web and marketing efforts of the Community Journals. She is experienced as both a managing editor and development editor on

peer-reviewed medical journals. Welcome to you also.

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It is the policy of this committee that we swear in all witnesses

before the testify. Would you all please stand and raise your right

hands?

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. CLAY. Thank you. You may be seated. Let the record reflect

that the witnesses answered in the affirmative.

Each of you, of course, will have 5 minutes to make an opening

statement. We have your complete written testimony as part of the

hearing record. Please observe the lights in front of you.

Dr. Roberts, you may begin.

STATEMENTS OF RICHARD ROBERTS, PH.D., F.R.S., CHIEF SCIENTIFIC OFFICER, NEW ENGLAND BIOLABS; SHARON F.

TERRY, PRESIDENT AND CEO, GENETIC ALLIANCE; ELLIOT

MAXWELL, DIRECTOR, DIGITAL CONNECTIONS COUNCIL,

COMMITTEE FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT; SOPHIA

COLAMARINO, VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH, AUTISM

SPEAKS; DAVID SHULENBURGER, VICE PRESIDENT FOR

ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, ASSOCIATION OF PUBLIC AND LAND

GRANT UNIVERSITIES; AND CATHERINE NANCARROW, MANAGING EDITOR, PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE COMMUNITY

JOURNALS

STATEMENT OF RICHARD ROBERTS

Mr. ROBERTS. I thank you, Chairman Clay.

My name is Sir Richard Roberts. I am chief scientific officer at

New England Biolabs, a small company in Ipswich, MA that makes

reagents for biological research.

I am also the 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or Medicine.

Let me thank you for inviting me to testify here on the important

subject of public access to the results of publicly funded research.

Because scientific research critically depends on the knowledge of

the scientific literature and building on the work of others, access

to this literature is the key to progress.

In my view, the open access movement is one of the single most

important initiatives currently underway within the scientific community.

In addition to my role as chief scientific officer, which involves

producing the scientific vision for the future business of New England Biolabs, I am also an active, working scientist, running both

an experimental laboratory and a computer-based bioinformatics

lab. In my various roles, I rely completely on digital access to a

broad swath of the scientific literature, so that I am aware of all

the major advances in biology as well as the latest work in my own

field.

I read articles in a large number of different journals, and am

acutely aware of the difficulties accessing articles that are not

available via open access. Because of the ever-increasing cost of

subscriptions, our company, like most small biotech companies,

cannot afford subscriptions to all of the journals we might read.

As a result, I often find myself paying the $30 or more that is

often necessary to read an article that is in a journal to which I

do not subscribe. Since a use of the scientific literature depends

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upon being able to quickly move from one article to another to find

the relevant science, it is frustrating and inefficient when each step

requires the time to make another payment. Even more disconcerting is when the article that one paid to read turns out to be totally

irrelevant to the search in hand.

Of course, the biggest problem is that without comprehensive access to the literature, it is impossible to know where the cutting

edge of science lies. It is at this cutting edge that science must

work if we are to be productive. This lack of access has a very deleterious impact on the small startup biotech companies and others

for whom cutting edge science is their bread and butter.

Promoting public access to publicly funded research results will

have a huge impact in improving the health of small U.S. companies that depend on science and will also send a strong message

that the routine practice of denying access to those who are unable

to afford the subscription costs is actually impeding science.

Also, as we all know, it is these small entrepreneurial companies

that create the new jobs in the United States, jobs that are very

badly needed at present.

While major universities enjoy a great deal of access to the scientific literature, no institution can afford to subscribe to all of the

journals that they might want to provide to their constituents. This

is even more of a problem in many other sectors of society. Many

of the smaller colleges, including most of the liberal arts colleges,

that feed their graduates into the major research universities, have

extremely limited access to the scientific literature. Ensuring public

access to at least that subset of research results produced using

public funds is something we can do right now, and would be a useful and exemplary step toward filling this gap.

Even more importantly, as was brought home to me when I attended the recent 2010 Intel Science Fair in San Jose is that high

school students, such as those preparing science fair projects, increasingly require access to the scientific literature if their projects

are to include the innovation that makes them the winners. While

most schools now have good access to computers, it is only when

articles are available through open access that they also have access to the full range of the scientific literature. Most high schools

can only dream of affording access to pricy scientific journals.

We must remember that these young people going through our

schools are the next generation of scientists that will enable our

country to remain competitive into the foreseeable future. Providing public access to the results of publicly funded research would

have an immediate and positive impact on the quality of information available to these students.

Too often we forget that research is carried out in many places

other than the well-known research universities. A strong policy

demanding open access to the results of Government-funded research can help small companies become competitive, can stimulate

job opportunities within those companies, and can ensure that our

students, the scientists of the future, can find out where the cutting edge of research really lies.

Thank you. I welcome any questions.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Roberts follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you so much, Dr. Roberts.

Ms. Terry, you are recognized for 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF SHARON F. TERRY

Ms. TERRY. Chairman Clay, thank you for the opportunity to testify at this hearing.

I am president and CEO of Genetic Alliance, which works to

transform health through genetics. Our network includes more

than 1,200 patient advocacy organizations and thousands of partnerships with universities, companies, government agencies and

policy organizations. The network is an open space for thousands

of shared resources, hundreds of creative tools and dozens of dynamic programs.

I am also the mom of two children diagnosed with

pseudoxanthoma elasticum in 1994. My husband, who is a trade

school graduate, and I, a college chaplain, stole access to medical

libraries, hacked into Internet Grateful Med, and ultimately read

400 articles on this disease. As a result of what we learned, we

founded PXE International, created a biobank, cloned the gene, created a diagnostic test and initiated clinical trials. We are the ordinary American public and our access to these articles has been critical.

We are not odd, there are many like us, managing disease research and managing personalized care. I have heard there are

hundreds of thousands of unique users of PubMed Central a day.

These are not only scientists. Imagine if we had public access to

all scientific articles.

We applaud the Congress for the current NIH policy. Translating

basic science into diagnostics and therapies is an urgent need. All

information on the raw materials of making sense of a disease and

mitigating its effects should be immediately available.

Some say that only academicians and scientists at major institutions need access to these journal articles. Not so. We live in an

information age that can and will thrust us into a new age of innovation and health and healing. This requires multidisciplinary articles in the hands of patients, parents, students, engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists in land grant colleges and historically

Black colleges. It is unconscionable that scientific information is

not immediately available to everyone.

While publishers argue that they create value around the raw information, we would argue that scientists funded with Federal tax

dollars and so stewards of the public trust infuse these articles

with value. There is no doubt that the publishers add value and

that the value proposition around this body of knowledge should be

paid for. But not the analysis of research results themselves. It is

the duty of the Federal Government to facilitate sunshine on this

data and to bring these articles into the public comments as quickly as possible.

We have seen business paradigms for all kinds of industries

evolve as information aggregation changes. It is time for the biomedical publishing industry to evolve as well. Today we are among

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lions of Americans. I have watched thousands of people in our community die in these years, and the time for waiting is over.

Let’s do it, let’s not spend any more of our precious time debating

this, commenting on this. We live on the promise and inestimable

value of publicly funded science. Obstacles to translating basic

science into practice abound. But gated access is an artificial one.

Remove barriers to information immediately. Grant us public access to publicly funded research without delay. We have a great

deal of work to do, and we need the tools now.

I would be happy to take any questions.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Terry follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you so much, Ms. Terry, for your testimony.

Mr. Maxwell, you are recognized for 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF ELLIOT MAXWELL

Mr. MAXWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am honored to have

this opportunity to testify before the subcommittee.

My name is Elliot Maxwell. I am here representing the Committee for Economic Development, a non-profit, non-partisan businessled public policy organization.

For nearly 70 years, CED has provided sound policy research on

major economic and social issues facing the Nation. The membership of CED is made up of some 200 senior corporate executives

from a wide range of industry sectors, as well as leaders from U.S.

universities.

To address cutting edge technology issues, particularly those

arising from the emergence of the Internet, CED established its

Digital Connections Council, comprised of information technology

experts from CED companies. Since 2004, I have directed the DCC,

which has published a series of reports focusing on the impact of

the Internet and on increasing digitization of information.

The members of the DCC, coming from high technology organizations, all rely incredibly on intellectual property protections as

their parent organizations. But they have come to realize that the

rise of the Internet and the digitization of information has led to

an explosion of greater openness, and that greater openness is critical for increasing innovation.

Economic development is part of the name of the Committee for

Economic Development, and that is where its focus is. These are

businesses that are interested in economic activity, in economic

growth and the innovation that is necessary to accomplish it. They

came to the conclusion that this bill and policies that increase

openness are absolutely crucial for economic growth and to restrict

access to information, to continue policies that would limit access

by businesses, by individuals, by academic institutions, more

broadly would be harmful to the economic growth of the United

States, would prevent the kind of growth we need at this very moment.

The bill addresses three important points. One is to increase access to the research. We have heard from two people, one representing a small business, one representing individuals who are

concerned about the health of their children or relatives. They don’t

have access. In some cases people can’t afford it, in some cases they

are not able to get to the information to where, or to institutions

where they would have access to it. Businesses can’t afford all the

kind of information that they would like to have.

It is axiomatic that the more people who have access to information, the more people who can buildupon it. And the real value of

information is in its use. It is not in the information itself; it is in

people using it.

The second important part is, you want to increase the impact

of the research that you fund. You want to get a higher return on

the investment, an enormous investment that is made by the U.S.

Government. And the way to do that is to give it more, make it

more available to people who are creative and who want to use this

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information. We can’t know before hand how they are going to use

it.

So it is very important to try to get this out as broadly as possible. To be frank, it is not necessarily in the interest of publishers

to get it out more broadly, it is in the interest of publishers to

maximize their return. And that is perfectly sensible.

It is in the interest of the U.S. Government to get its funded research out to as many people as possible to broaden its impact.

Greater openness, greater accessibility increases the speed of discovery. It broadens discovery because it makes information available to people who might not otherwise know about it, or even be

working in the same field. It reduces redundant research. It keeps

people from going over blind alleys they wouldn’t know about because they didn’t have access to it.

And most importantly, it allows more people to innovate upon

that research. Think about the Weather Service. I remember 2

years ago, 3 years ago, people were saying, ‘‘why don’t we have the

Weather Service’s information?’’ We can get it from the Weather

Channel. But the Weather Channel couldn’t exist without the

availability of U.S. Government information. It is allowing people

to have access to information, to innovate upon it, that creates

those opportunities that allows people to build businesses, to create

jobs, to innovate. That is what we need to do now.

So we are speaking for businesses who want innovation, who

want economic growth and know that the way to do that, the social

return on the investment of research is enhanced by making it

more broadly available. It is not enhanced by restricting it.

It helps people who worry about the health of their children, it

helps small businesses. It helps anybody who is creative in making

available this information. And because it is a U.S. Government investment, we need to think about the best way of increasing that

return on investment.

It is consistent with intellectual property laws, the idea that

journal articles exist separately from the research in some disconnected fashion seems implausible. They wouldn’t exist without this

research. We need to do everything we can to make the return

higher, to spur innovation and to get more economic growth.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Maxwell follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you so much, Mr. Maxwell.

Professor Colamarino, you are recognized for 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF SOPHIA COLAMARINO

Ms. COLAMARINO. Thank you, Chairman Clay. I am speaking on

behalf of Autism Speaks, the Nation’s largest autism science and

advocacy organization. Importantly, I ask that my full statement

be included in the hearing record.

I am here today as a scientist with a Ph.D. in neuroscience who

serves as the vice president of research for Autism Speaks. We invest over $20 million in annual funding for research into the

causes, prevention and treatments for autism.

I am also speaking to you today as the architect of the first public access policy for a U.S.-based non-profit advocacy organization.

Today I would like to underscore the importance of open access

from three perspectives: that of the families affected by a disorder;

that of an active scientist who needs access to effectively do her job;

and that of a funder that needs access to achieve our mission and

provide accountability while doing so.

So first, the families. My main motivation for being here today

is the desire to improve the lives of individuals with autism. Autism impacts nearly 1 in 100 children in the United States. There

are currently no effective treatments that address the core symptoms. For decades, parents and care providers have cobbled together intervention approaches as they best see fit.

Access to the latest findings would empower them to be more

educated advocates by allowing them to read first-hand the research progress. However, they have to struggle to find the most

credible information necessary to make informed decisions because

of what currently amounts to an arbitrary barrier to accessing published research literature. Sadly, in 2010, where essentially anything said by anyone can be accessible within a matter of moments,

families are inundated with information and have access to all but

the most scientifically rigorous data. And it is time for that to

change.

Second, my job as a scientist. I am tasked on providing counsel

and investing millions in research funding. However, when I left

academia to direct research in the context of an advocacy organization, I had no idea what a major hurdle I would find. On a Friday

in 2004, I left my research position at the Saulk Institute, where

I had full access to scientific literature. The following Monday, I

started my new position as science director of an international research organization and I had none.

To this day, Autism Speaks grantees and fellow scientists are

shocked to find out that our organization does not have free access

to these articles. This is not unique to us. It is not financially possible for non-profit funders of health research and training to subscribe to the full range of science journals needed to do their work.

I also want to emphasize, this barrier is not exclusive to science

duties. My colleagues in our Government relations divisions cannot

access the primary research literature required to substantiate

their policy recommendations.

In sum, there is an entire segment of scientists and health advocates blocked from effectively doing their jobs without this access.

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Third, our mission. The mission of Autism Speaks is to improve

the future for all who struggle with autism. We are dedicated to

funding global biomedical research and translating discoveries into

tangible impacts. I cannot stress how important it is for research

findings to be in the public domain. Funding organizations such as

ours can support as much research as they wish. But unless the

knowledge is utilized by others, it remains useless.

Unfortunately, just as there are scientists currently denied access based on our employment situations, there are also academic

researchers in less developed countries who cannot afford journal

access, and even lay people who want to devote their minds to autism but cannot gain access to the literature to study it. It is critical to our mission that research papers resulting from public funding be readily available to anyone with an interest in autism research.

We must also be accountable in pursuit of this mission. Our donors are typically the families of the very individuals we are aiming to help, many of whom are already financially struggling due

to the heavy burden of autism care. It is exceedingly important for

them to see the outcome of their investment and their impact on

reducing disease burden.

I find it frustratingly difficult to explain to a donor who provided

me with the money in the first place to pay for the research that

they have to pay once again to see the outcome of that research.

Now, as I said at the start, Autism Speaks is perhaps uniquely

qualified to call for expanded access to the results of publicly funded research, because in 2008, we implemented our own public access policy. We modeled this policy on the highly successful policy

of the NIH. Several other non-profit organizations have since expressed interest in following ours. This is perhaps the best proof

that what I have spoken of today is not about the needs of autism

per se, but about the fundamental way to change the way stakeholders are finally included in this discovery process.

In summary, open access to publicly funded research will lead to

more informed advocacy and further research advances. It has

enormous benefits for families that need information that directly

affects their lives, and it will greatly enhance the ability of scientists like me who quite simply require access to invest our scarce

research dollars. It will also help the myriad other organizations

such as Autism Speaks achieve their mission; namely, benefiting

the public by accelerating research toward breakthrough discoveries, treatments and eventually cures.

Thank you for providing me with this opportunity to speak, and

I am happy to take any questions. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Colamarino follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you so much, Professor.

Dr. Shulenburger.

STATEMENT OF DAVID E. SHULENBURGER

Dr. SHULENBURGER. Thank you, Chairman Clay, for the opportunity to speak today about public access. It is an important topic

for higher education for the future of the country.

The Association of Public and Land Grant Universities [APLU],

supports Federal legislation ensuring public access to scholarly articles growing out of federally funded research. APLU is an association of public research universities including all flagship and all

land grant universities in every State. Our 219 members enroll

more than 4.7 million students, award 60 percent of the U.S. doctoral degrees, and conduct nearly two-thirds of all federally funded

academic research.

For the last 4 years, I have been the academic affairs officer of

APLU. Before joining the organization, I spent 13 years as provost

at the University of Kansas, and a total of 34 years on its faculty.

I am also an economist.

My interest in access to scholarly writing was intensified both by

my duties as provost and my discipline as an economist. For over

two decades, journal prices increased at a nearly 10 percent annual

rate, while KU’s budget barely kept up with inflation. Why did

journal prices increase at a rate that made them less available to

higher education? That question has since been my major research

focus.

The problem we address is that faculty from time to time experience delays in accessing articles published in scholarly journals or

cannot gain access at all. These road blocks harm their productivity. The public access policy is primarily aimed at easing these road

blocks.

But access to scholarly literature is also important to the quality

of education. Clearly, superior graduate education is based on the

use of this literature. But this research also informs good undergraduate instruction. Unfortunately, students at non-research institutions and their faculty don’t have broad access to this research

literature. Perhaps those with least access are at the community

colleges, where half our country’s students are now enrolled. A Federal public access policy would have positive impacts on all postsecondary education.

As you have heard, many businesses, especially high-tech

startups, need access to research findings. Better access improves

their chances of remaining competitive. The need of individuals to

access the scholarly literature comes from many directions. When

a child receives a deadly diagnosis, parents have difficulties understanding why they can’t have ready access to the research that has

been funded with their public dollars.

APLU supports NIH’s public access model. It works. So we support its spread to other funding agencies. The Federal Research

Public Access Act follows NIH’s proven model, and APLU endorses

its passage, with some caveats.

Central deposits, such as NIH has, may not be necessary. An article conceivably could be placed in a faculty member’s own university repository and be included virtually in the funding agency’s

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public access repository. To the extent possible, we would hope deposit requirements and procedures should be uniform across funding agencies, because that would reduce the cost of compliance considerably.

The NIH has a flexible, zero to 12 month embargo period, not as

you have heard, a one size fits all, but it is a flexible period that

exists now, and it depends upon the preferences of the journal publication. We believe that is acceptable for public access. Shorter

would be better, but 12 months is acceptable.

A choice has to be made between deposit of the final manuscript

version of the article, or the article in the form in which it appears

in the journal. We favor the latter, so long as full text, word by

word search can be made. Some suggest that access to the final

grant report would provide adequate access to research findings.

We do not accept this contention. Most grant reports are narrowly

focused. Journal articles generally provide context for the results

reported, relate those results to the wider literature, and are more

easily located through public finding aids.

Public access with characteristics I have enumerated, would be

compatible with the continuation of subscription-based scholarly

journals. The evidence is that public access has little impact on

subscription revenue and is thus fully consistent with ensuring

that the refereeing of the literature continues. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Shulenburger follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. From a Missouri Tiger to a Kansas Jayhawk, thank

you, too. [Laughter.]

Ms. Nancarrow, you are recognized for 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF CATHERINE NANCARROW

Ms. NANCARROW. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a privilege to

testify today before the subcommittee about the importance of public access to the results of federally funded research.

I am speaking on behalf of the Public Library of Science [PLoS].

PLoS is a non-profit publisher of peer-reviewed journals. But what

makes PLoS different from the bulk of journal publishers is that

every article we publish is open access. Each is freely and publicly

available online as soon as it is published.

My name is Catherine Nancarrow, and I am the managing editor

of PLoS’s community journal program. I have over 25 years of experience in publishing, and I have managed a number of peer-reviewed medical and bioscience journals. In 2004, I was delighted to

join PLoS, because of its mission to drive a transition toward comprehensive public access to all research articles.

Policies promoting public access have been embraced by many organizations beyond PLoS. Yet concerns have been expressed that

they will be detrimental to the scholarly publishing enterprise.

My goal today is to make three key points. PLoS has shown that

open access journals can be published according to the highest

standards. We have shown that open access publishing is economically sustainable. And finally, the real benefit of immediate public

access is that it transforms the research literature into a profoundly powerful resource for research and education.

To address the point about quality, PLoS has consistently adhered to the highest standards of editorial integrity and publishing

ethics. We knew that we would only develop broader confidence in

open access publishing if the quality of the articles that we publish

is of the highest standard.

Seven years from when we launched PLoS Biology, our journals

are highly regarded as trusted sources of research information and

are desirable venues for researchers to publish their best work.

Our journals have international editorial boards comprised of leading researchers across a range of disciplines, are featured in leading blogs and media outlets and receive substantial numbers of

submissions each month and continue to grow.

In addition, many of our journal articles are highly cited, another

indication of their significance to the research community.

To address the point of financial viability, let me briefly explain

our business model. Whereas most publishers charge a fee to access

their content, PLoS charges a fee to publish in its journals. In this

way, the cost of publishing can be recovered before publication and

the content can therefore be made freely and publicly accessible as

soon as it is published.

Using this model, PLoS has progressed steadily toward sustainability and posted its first two profitable quarters in Q1 and Q2 of

2010. In doing so, we will be on target to make a modest profit.

This achievement represents a landmark for PLoS, but also for

open access publishing as a whole. As well as being economically

sustainable as an organization, our individual community journals

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are each fully self-sufficient. They represent models for how typical

academic journals can maintain high standards of publishing and

achieve immediate public access supported by publication fees.

This is relevant to all publishers considering a move to open access, whether commercial, not-for-profit, university presses or scientific societies. PLoS is not alone in demonstrating the economic

success of open access publishing, however. Two large commercial

publishers, BioMed Central and Hindawi Publishing, have also

shown that open access publishing, based on the publication fee

model, is sustainable in environments where public policies have

been put in place by national funders, such as the Wellcome Trust

and the Research Councils UK. A prominent example is Springer,

who bought BioMed Central in 2008 and continues to expand their

open access publishing operation.

Beyond publishers, there are demonstrable and critical commitments to open access from the other key stakeholders in publishing: funders, institutions, libraries, policymakers, and the research

community. Just last week, UNESCO announced ‘‘scientific information is both a researcher’s greatest output and technological innovation’s most important resource. UNESCO promotes open access.’’

I will end by highlighting two examples of how researchers have

made the most of public and open access to PLoS articles. Professor

David Shotton from Oxford University reworked an article about a

tropical disease caused by Leptospira infection. He linked various

terms in the article to other sources of information and data, enhanced the figure to provide moveable interactive maps and enriched tables with downloadable data. A series of editorials in PLoS

Computational Biology has been translated into Chinese,

repurposed into a series of video presentations and developed into

a graduate level course curriculum.

These are just first steps, but they show how public access promotes creative re-use of content and transforms the literature into

a more powerful resource for research and teaching. With the

elimination of all barriers to access, our use of the literature is only

limited by our imagination.

Thank you, and I am happy to take any questions you might

have.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Nancarrow follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Ms. Nancarrow. I thank the entire panel

for their testimony.

Let me ask a panel-wide question. We can start with Dr. Roberts.

Are you concerned that open access would affect the peer review

process?

Mr. ROBERTS. Not at all. In fact, it is already clear that it has

no effect on the peer review process. For many years, I was chief

editor of Nucleic Acids Research, the first journal to go from being

subscription based to being open access. We saw absolutely no difference between the willingness of reviewers to come and review

for us when we were a subscription based journal or when we were

an open access journal.

I for instance review frequently for the PLoS journals at no

charge. Contrary to what you may have heard earlier, reviewers

don’t get paid. Reviewers do it for free. I have a paper in my briefcase at the moment from PLoS Genetics that I am reviewing.

It is unrelated, peer review is unrelated to whether you are looking at subscription journals or whether they are open access journals. We do peer review as scientists because we feel this is a very

important part of our service to science.

Mr. CLAY. Wow. Thank you for that response.

Ms. Terry.

Ms. TERRY. I agree completely with that. I too am a reviewer, for

free, as well. I think that what we are looking for is an ecosystem

that allows a greater enhancement of publishing overall. You have

heard some of those things here today. In addition to the immediate peer reviewers of articles, articles that are widely disseminated, are able to be integrated into technologies, into diagnostics,

etc., and transformed more quickly.

I think the community itself, the scientists, want to do excellent

work and want to hear from their peers, not just in a formal process and in a somewhat antiquated publishing system, but in a

broader one that takes into account innovation and the technologies that are making the Internet really successful in disseminating all these augmented and annotated resources.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you.

Mr. Maxwell, how does open access affect us?

Mr. MAXWELL. I think as we have already heard, that there are

peer review processes in open access journals as well as in proprietary journals. I want to make one slightly different point, and that

is that the greater the public access to the material, the more likely

it is that people will find problems with it or make suggestions

about it. And it is not a two or three people reading of a particular

article. When it gets out and available, more people can see it and

more people can discover things that they can buildupon, or things

that they can criticize.

Mr. CLAY. So that means the information could actually be enhanced?

Mr. MAXWELL. Absolutely.

Mr. CLAY. I see.

Mr. MAXWELL. And sometimes I think that is an underrated part

of what happens in the Internet. Now, that is not to deny that

there is a lot of garbage out there. We know that. But as people

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have said repeatedly, sunshine is the best disinfectant. It is better

to have people able to have access and comment than to withhold.

Mr. CLAY. Professor Colamarino, any comment?

Ms. COLAMARINO. Thank you. I think that our publishers here

can speak to this a little bit better, but as far as I am concerned,

it shouldn’t have an impact. In fact, as Dr. Roberts already mentioned, and it wasn’t brought up, I don’t believe, on the earlier panels, reviewers are not actually paid. It is a public service work that

they do.

I also want to echo what Mr. Maxwell said, which is what I was

going to say, which is that science is self-correcting. So in fact,

there is further review once the article gets out there. That review

is done by the broader community. That is how science gets used.

It is very iterative. So it actually is furthered with open access.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you.

Dr. Shulenburger.

Dr. SHULENBURGER. I completely agree. We have had considerable experience with public access, as well as open access. We don’t

see journals declining in numbers. In fact, the journals are a very

healthy ecosystem. They are increasing in numbers very rapidly

now. Thus I am confident that subscription-based journals will continue. That has been the experience under NIH, and I think we

will see, as NIH’s experience gets longer, that will be the case.

But as healthy as this ecosystem is, and the fact that it depends

upon free labor for review and only pays to organize those reviews,

I am confident we will develop models that will continue it into the

future. We must.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you.

Ms. Nancarrow, will open access have a negative impact on peer

review?

Ms. NANCARROW. Absolutely not. I can say that both as an editor

of having been in subscription based journals prior to coming to

PLoS. But I have to say that one of the hallmarks of peer review,

or the journals’ responsibility, is qualitative and quantitative and

a peer review of excellence. And I think PLoS has shown that all

of our journals provide, in fact, many of our authors would say it

is extremely rigorous peer review. We owe a huge debt of gratitude

to the scientists who do dedicate their time to it and ensure the

heathy assessment of the science that we publish.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you so much.

I guess I can direct this to the panel, or maybe Dr. Shulenburger

could respond. Could you give your opinion as to how you believe

open access would affect students and those researchers working

on projects?

Dr. SHULENBURGER. In order to do the best science, in order not

to repeat yourself, you have to know what has been done before.

And you only know that if the material is available, is published,

and you can get to it as a researchers. Much of our training of doctoral students is done as they do research. Having that material

fully available to them makes a difference.

But I want to repeat what I said earlier. We think of this as distant material. I have had a great many of my undergraduates who

went to the literature and used it. Those community college students would use it, their faculty would use it. Maybe not daily, but

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the best of them have potentials to win Nobel prizes some day. We

just simply need to put before them material that will keep them

challenged and make the most of their talents.

Mr. CLAY. Anyone else on how to impact students? Dr. Roberts.

Mr. ROBERTS. As I said, when I was at the Intel Science Fair,

I was absolutely astonished at the level at which these students

work. These are 17, 18 year olds. A colleague of mine at New England Biolabs has a daughter who is now 18. When she was 16, she

was doing science fair projects that were only possible because she

had access to the Internet through our company and to literature

through our company. At her high school, she had no access to this.

High schools can’t afford access to the literature.

And I think we often do a great disservice to our students by denying them access to the resources they need. We often think they

are not ready for it. We are wrong. These good students, they need

access to this material. And they are the future. This is the future

of science. This is where we are going. We have to do everything

possible to put them in touch with the information.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you for that response.

Let me ask Professor Colamarino, the NIH policy provides the

public with access to medical research. How would expanding the

policy to other areas of science help patients with information that

would be relevant to their illnesses?

Ms. COLAMARINO. There are many Federal programs that fund

research beyond just the NIH. And I think success in tackling

these very complex disorders is only going to come from using a

very integrative approach to examining the data. Speaking specifically about autism, which is a very complex biological and behavioral disorder, you need to have information from everything that

ranges not just from the biomedical to, say, the psychological to the

educational as well.

Mr. CLAY. Some say that granting access to STM articles does

not help the non-professional, such as patients and their families.

How do you respond to that?

Ms. COLAMARINO. I travel this country, sometimes up to 90 percent of the time, meeting with these families and lecturing to them.

I have found them to be nothing but sophisticated in their ability

to interpret and read these papers. In the instances where they

have questions, they print them out and they bring them to their

care providers. This is, the families are starved for information.

This would very much help provide them with what they are missing.

Mr. CLAY. Mr. Maxwell.

Mr. MAXWELL. When you asked about the extension of this policy

more broadly, it is very important to recognize that while experts

are very valuable and need to be looked to, there is information,

experience, expertise available far beyond those people we would

designate as an expert in a particular area. That is one of the real

advantages of thinking about broad access. Because we can’t know

in advance who is going to make this discovery, who is going to

buildupon it, who is going to have some entrepreneurial take on it

to create a new business.

We don’t know that in advance. If we simply say, ‘‘if you can afford it, you can get it,’’ or ‘‘if you are an expert you can get it.’’ That

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misses the real point of openness, which is to open to a broad and

democratic group of people who can take the information and make

it more valuable.

Mr. CLAY. Which takes me to my next question. Ms. Terry, several witnesses have referred to access to research data. I understand that access to data is very different and that publishers

agree that data should be made available. Can you explain how

this is different from access to journal articles? And should we be

focusing on ensuring that data resulting from Government-funded

research is made available?

Ms. TERRY. Thanks very much for that question. I think we

should be doing both. And the reason for that is the articles themselves are the distillation of the research data that has been done

by intelligent people who are experts in a certain way. And I completely agree with Mr. Maxwell that then those need to be released

into the ecosystem that will allow them to be enhanced more greatly.

The data itself, from publicly funded research as well, should be

shared broadly, including, I would say, anything that touches a patient. So, clinical trial data, biospecimen data, etc. But we really

need both. Because there right now is way more information than

we can ever, ever deal with. And we need to have the hearts and

mind of all the individuals who care from every discipline looking

at this data and looking at these research articles.

Mr. CLAY. Let me just make an editorial comment. I hear witnesses all the time. I have never had a witness come in and admit

that they committed a crime. You admitted that you stole information and I guess you were driven by passion and a love. I have to

compliment you on your being so straightforward and forthcoming.

Dr. Shulenburger, some have argued that in the current STM

publishing model, the American public is taxed twice, once to provide the billions of dollars for the research and again to provide the

hundreds of thousands of dollars for public institutions to buy back

access to the results of that research. Can you explain what is

meant by this argument?

Dr. SHULENBURGER. I think it is at least partially true. Public institutions are indeed funded by tax dollars as the research is. The

cost of that research has risen to a point that we can’t afford it,

as you have heard, can’t make it available to our own scientists.

I said partially true, the journal publishers certainly add value.

But they don’t add sufficient value to justify keeping the articles

that are produced behind gates for the entirety of the article’s life.

And that is the current situation. What we are asking for is, remove that tax after a year. Let the journal publishers make their

return during the embargo period and then let’s make sure that

the public has full access to that which they paid for.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you.

Ms. Nancarrow, are the reports generally in a usable form for the

general public?

Ms. NANCARROW. The reports meaning? I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, to what do you refer in terms of the reports?

Mr. CLAY. The research. The publishers’ reports.

Ms. NANCARROW. The published reports. I am sorry, could you repeat the question?

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Mr. CLAY. Basically, it is the published reports that they provide

to the public. Are they in useable form?

Ms. NANCARROW. I think it depends on the type of submission

that we receive. But generally, they are in an understandable form

to an expert panel. But they are, I think, to quote Ms. Terry, there

is an interpretive process that occurs after that.

Mr. CLAY. Ms. Terry.

Ms. TERRY. I would also say that the output of all these journals

is understandable. And certainly to a certain degree, there are opportunities then to understand further. I certainly learned a lot

reading 400 articles on pseudoxanthoma elasticum, something, as

my husband says, we didn’t know a gene from a hubcap when we

started.

But all of this information has with it the ability to understand

using dictionaries, encyclopedias and other experts. So it is in a usable form, and we are using it every day, hundreds of thousands

of us.

Mr. CLAY. So you have to decipher and interpret?

Ms. TERRY. Sure. Just like if I read my auto repair manual, I occasionally have to look up a word. But I can learn, and so can the

general public.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you. And let me thank this panel for your testimony, for your indulgence with this committee. You certainly bring

a different perspective to this committee.

I appreciate your service, appreciate your coming in. This panel

is dismissed.

Our final panel consists of one witness, Dr. David Lipman of the

National Institutes of Health. Dr. Lipman is the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a Division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Appointed in 1989, he is overseeing the development of NCBI as a nationally and internationally recognized resource for molecular biology information.

Dr. Lipman is an elected member of the National Academy of

Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of

Arts and Sciences, just to name a few. Welcome, Dr. Lipman.

It is the policy of this subcommittee to swear in all witnesses. I

would ask you to rise and raise your right hand.

[Witness sworn.]

Mr. CLAY. Thank you, and you may be seated. Let the record reflect that the witness answered in the affirmative. We will allow

you 5 minutes to make an opening statement, Dr. Lipman.

STATEMENT OF DAVID J. LIPMAN, M.D., DIRECTOR, NATIONAL

CENTER FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY INFORMATION, NATIONAL

LIBRARY OF MEDICINE, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH,

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Dr. LIPMAN. Chairman Clay, it is my pleasure to testify before

you today. My name is David Lipman. I am the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information [NCBI], at the National Library of Medicine, within the National Institutes of

Health, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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NCBI was established by Congress in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information. NCBI maintains more

than 40 data bases, including GenBank, the data base of all known

DNA sequences, and PubMed Central [PMC], the archive of journal

articles in the biomedical sciences. PMC is also the repository for

NIH-funded articles submitted in compliance with the NIH public

access policy.

We launched PMC 10 years ago in collaboration with a number

of publishers who deposited their journal articles in PMC to make

them more widely accessible. Our experience has illustrated the

benefits that a central repository could have, not only for scientists,

but for doctors, researchers and the general public as well.

In 2005, NIH announced a voluntary public access policy. The

policy requested recipients of NIH funding to deposit a copy of their

peer-reviewed manuscripts in PMC. The policy permitted delay of

public availability of the article for up to 12 months after publication. However, compliance was only at 5 percent.

To improve compliance, Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2008 instructed NIH to make the public access policy mandatory. This had a dramatic effect on compliance.

Of the 88,000 NIH-funded articles published in 2009, 70 percent

have been submitted to PMC and that figure continues to grow.

With increased content has come increased usage. On a typical

weekday, 740,000 articles are retrieved by 420,000 different users.

Last year, 99 percent of the articles in PMC were downloaded at

least once, and 28 percent were retrieved more than 100 times. Annual operating costs for the public access system are approximately

$3.5 million to $4 million per year, which represents a small fraction of NIH’s budget authority of $30 billion per year. Our costs are

low because of the infrastructure and expertise that the National

Library of Medicine has developed over many years.

The success of the NIH model has stimulated similar efforts in

other countries. Major biomedical funding organization in the U.K.

and Canada, for example, have public access policies similar to

NIH’s, and both countries use PMC software for their repositories.

This collaboration expands access for U.S. users to research done

worldwide.

But to look at PMC as just a repository for scientific articles is

to miss the bigger picture. PMC is an integral part of a larger information infrastructure that is accelerating discovery. Articles in

PMC are entry points into a vast body of biomedical information

maintained by NCBI and the Library of Medicine. Every day, users

download over 13 trillion bytes of data, which is equivalent to all

the books in the Library of Congress.

Interpreting these data requires access to the underlying knowledge that is embodied in scientific articles. By having PMC articles

integrated with our other data bases, we are able to create linkages

among these resources that can advance scientific discovery. For

example, during the recent flu pandemic, NCBI was the major site

for collecting all flu sequences. Within months, we had over 20,000

viral sequences from around the world.

Through use of our system, a researcher could read an article on

drug resistant variants of the flu virus, and with the click of a

mouse, compare new isolates to all other flu variants to gain new

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insights into flu epidemiology. As this example illustrates, PMC

and the NIH public access policy ensure that the knowledge that

is generated by the Government’s investment in research enables

continued progress in biomedical science, having a comprehensive

resource that integrates knowledge and data, speeds the discovery

process that is critical for improving human health.

Thank you for the opportunity to present our experiences to you.

I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Lipman follows:]

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Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Dr. Lipman.

Let me ask you, why is it important for there to be Governmentrun data bases of federally funded research articles? For example,

what do you think about requiring the Government to link to the

original journal’s Web site in order to read the articles?

Dr. LIPMAN. Well, our experience, I think we found several important advantages of having the actual content available at the

National Library of Medicine. For one thing, the Library of Medicine has been archiving the literature for 150 years. The historical

record is that archiving is done by libraries, not by publishers. So

this is very precious information, and we really need to have longterm archiving.

Two, when the content is not being used directly on your site,

when there are problems, problems with the underlying data, problems in terms of being able to connect to other kinds of information, we just can’t find that out. The reason why so many Web sites

really find it valuable to mine the way people use their Web site

is they can improve it by seeing how it is being used.

We have been doing this for several years. We call it our discovery initiative. We can provide quantitative information on how

users improve their use of the resource by us being able to follow

what they are doing and actually train the system instead of trying

to train the users. So that is just a few of the reasons why we find

it really critical that the archive be available.

In addition, our outside advisors, we did try a link out option for

a period of time in the beginning of PubMed Central, probably

about 10 years ago, actually at the start. We had a number of problems with doing that, and they ultimately advised us to stop that

option because of the problems that we faced.

Mr. CLAY. Out of curiosity, have you been able to digitize and

make that 150 years worth of research and knowledge accessible

to the public?

Dr. LIPMAN. That is a very exciting prospect. But we have begun

some of that. I will say one thing, our initial advisors in PubMed

Central said, the information in the older articles is very valuable.

What about the participating publishers, the publishers, and there

are quite a few, hundreds of them, hundreds of journals voluntarily, even before the public access policy, were collaborating with

us in doing this. We worked with them and the British government, the Wellcome Trust and the British Government provided

funds for us to digitize articles going back to the 1800’s. This included articles from the American Society of Microbiology, where

there was tremendously interesting data on the Spanish flu from

1918 and other diseases where, while they didn’t have the molecular biology methods, they did have doctors’ observations and epidemiological data that has proved valuable.

So that is a great point. And to the extent that we have been

able to do this, we have found it has been tremendously beneficial.

Mr. CLAY. Wonderful. Doctor, I understand that it has only been

a few years. But how has the NIH policy affected research, and

how do you believe it has affected publishing?

Dr. LIPMAN. I don’t know how to say this the right way, but 10

years ago, when we were starting PubMed Central, we heard a lot

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of the same concerns that the publishers raised. Ten years has

gone by and a lot of those things didn’t happen.

So we heard those same things again 5 years ago when there

was the start of the public access policy. Now it has been in full

force in a mandatory form for 2 years. And at least we are not

aware of dramatic changes because of that.

On the other hand, as we said, we have a heck of a lot more articles that are now being intensively used by people around the

United States. We are seeing a lot of benefits already, at least in

terms of usage. It takes a while before that translates into differences in health care and so forth. But usage has to come first.

Mr. CLAY. So I would assume the scientific community is no different than the rest of American society, we tend to resist change

initially, and then after the initial shock and they get over it, then

they embrace the change. Have you see widespread use and increasing use of your site?

Dr. LIPMAN. Yes, actually there has been about a doubling, I

think, for many aspects of usage just since 2008. So yes, we do see

an increased use. And actually, I would make an important point,

that as more data, more articles are in PubMed Central, we see a

concomitant increase in usage. It is sort of proportional. We find

that for all of our data bases, the more comprehensive they are, the

more the usage is. They just track right along with each other.

Mr. CLAY. If the platform used to support PubMed Central is

portable, can other agencies use this to establish their own repositories?

Dr. LIPMAN. Thank you for that question. Absolutely, we would

be pleased to help any agency in that manner. Frankly, the expertise that the Library of Medicine has had over 10 years of doing

this, I think, could be used in many ways to help the other agencies from simply consulting in advice to using software like

PubMed Central, to even having the Library of Medicine do the

first phase of the creation of the Government-wide archive. In other

words, the sort of librarian aspect of getting the content from publishers or from authors, making sure it is in a stable, uniform digital format, and then providing at least simple forms of retrieval

across it all. We could do that and I think we could do it very cost

effectively. We could project those costs.

But then for domain-specific usage, things that are very important for some areas of physics or meteorology or other areas outside

of our expertise, those articles could be pulled into an agency-specific, domain-specific archive. So I think there is a whole range of

ways that the experience of the Library of Medicine could be used

to make this succeed.

Mr. CLAY. Thank you for that response. Last question. Can you

describe the process by which researchers submit their work to

NIH? Is it a difficult process to comply with?

Dr. LIPMAN. Right now, there are 900 journals that have arrangements with the Library of Medicine so that the content comes

in automatically. They have it in one digital form, we convert it

into our format. And the author doesn’t really need to do anything.

That is about 40 percent of the articles.

For the 60 percent remaining, the author does have to upload the

manuscript to our site. But that process takes about 10 minutes.

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So I would say 10 minutes in the course of 6 months of research,

I would say that is reasonably easy.

Mr. CLAY. Pretty reasonable.

Let me thank you, and thank all of the witnesses on all three

panels who indulged us today, who gave of their time to come. I

will say that public access to federally funded research was a different topic for me, but I certainly learned a little today.

And with that, this hearing is adjourned. Thank you.

[Whereupon, at 5:18 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

[Additional information submitted for the hearing record follows:]

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