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73–607PDF 2012

FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH: 

EXAMINING PUBLIC ACCESS AND 

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION INTERESTS 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS 

AND OVERSIGHT 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND 

TECHNOLOGY 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2012 

Serial No. 112–74 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov 
(II) 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

HON. RALPH M. HALL, Texas, Chair 

F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, JR., 

Wisconsin 

LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland 

FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma 

JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois 

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri 

RANDY NEUGEBAUER, Texas 

MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas 

PAUL C. BROUN, Georgia 

SANDY ADAMS, Florida 

BENJAMIN QUAYLE, Arizona 

CHARLES J. ‘‘CHUCK’’ FLEISCHMANN, 

Tennessee 

E. SCOTT RIGELL, Virginia 

STEVEN M. PALAZZO, Mississippi 

MO BROOKS, Alabama 

ANDY HARRIS, Maryland 

RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois 

CHIP CRAVAACK, Minnesota 

LARRY BUCSHON, Indiana 

DAN BENISHEK, Michigan 

VACANCY 

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas 

JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois 

LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

BRAD MILLER, North Carolina 

DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois 

DONNA F. EDWARDS, Maryland 

BEN R. LUJA ́ N, New Mexico 

PAUL D. TONKO, New York 

JERRY MCNERNEY, California 

TERRI A. SEWELL, Alabama 

FREDERICA S. WILSON, Florida 

HANSEN CLARKE, Michigan 

SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon 

VACANCY 

VACANCY 

VACANCY 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND OVERSIGHT

HON. PAUL C. BROUN, Georgia, Chair 

F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, JR., 

Wisconsin 

SANDY ADAMS, Florida 

RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois 

LARRY BUCSHON, Indiana 

DAN BENISHEK, Michigan 

VACANCY 

RALPH M. HALL, Texas 

PAUL D. TONKO, New York 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

BRAD MILLER, North Carolina 

JERRY MCNERNEY, California 

EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Thursday, March 29, 2012 

Page 

Witness List ............................................................................................................. 2 

Hearing Charter ...................................................................................................... 3 

Opening Statements 

Statement by Representative Paul C. Broun, Chairman, Subcommittee on 

Investigations and Oversight, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ............................................................... 18 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 19 

Statement by Representative Paul Tonko, Ranking Minority Member, Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, Committee on Science, Space, 

and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ............................................... 20 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 21 

Witnesses: 

Mr. H. Frederick Dylla, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, 

American Institute of Physics 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 23 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 26 

Mr. Elliot Maxwell, Project Director for the Digital Connections Council, 

Committee on Economic Development 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 33 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 36 

Dr. Crispin Taylor, Executive Director, American Society of Plant Biologists 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 44 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 47 

Mr. Stuart Shieber, Director, Office for Scholarly Communications, Harvard 

University 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 54 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 57 

Mr. Scott Plutchak, Director, Lister Hill Library at University of Alabama 

at Birmingham 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 68 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 70 

Discussion 76 

Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions 

Mr. H. Frederick Dylla, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, 

American Institute of Physics ............................................................................. 92 

Mr. Elliot Maxwell, Project Director for the Digital Connections Council, 

Committee on Economic Development ............................................................... 103 

Dr. Crispin Taylor, Executive Director, American Society of Plant Biologists ... 108 

Mr. Stuart Shieber, Director, Office for Scholarly Communications, Harvard 

University ............................................................................................................. 120 

Mr. Scott Plutchak, Director, Lister Hill Library at University of Alabama 

at Birmingham ..................................................................................................... 129 
Page

IV 

Appendix II: 

Letter submitted by Representative Zoe Lofgren, Member, Subcommittee on 

Investigations and Oversight, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ............................................................... 138 

Response to Federal Register Notice Request for Information submitted by 

Dr. H. Frederick Dylla ......................................................................................... 142 

Response to Federal Register Notice Request for Information submitted by 

Dr. Crispin Taylor ................................................................................................ 166 

ALPSP Response to OSTP Request for Information ............................................. 179 
(1) 

FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH: 

EXAMINING PUBLIC ACCESS AND 

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION INTERESTS 

THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2012 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND OVERSIGHT, COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY, Washington, D.C. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:35 a.m., in Room 

2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Paul Broun 

[Chairman of the Subcommittee] presiding. 
2 

""lPH M. HlIll, TEXAS ~D~IE "ERmLEJOHN~()N. TEXAS 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

2321 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING 

WASHINGTON, DC 20515-6301 

1202)225 5371 

Subcommittee Oll Investigations & Ovcr~ighL Hearing 

Federal{v Funded Research: 

Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests 

Thursday, lvIarch 29, 2012 

9;30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Of lice Building 

Dr. Frederick Dylla, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, American 

Instimte of Physics. 

MI:'. Elliot Ma:nvell: Project Director for the Digital Connection Council, Committee on 

l::conomic Development. 

Dr. Crispin Taylor, Executive Director, American Society of Plant Biologists. 

]\.-Ir. Stuart Shicbcr, Director, Office for Scholarly COUlmuuicatioIls, Harvard 

l:niversity. 

Mr, Scolt Plutchak, Director, Lister Hill Library, University of AJabama at 

Birmingham 
3 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight 

HEARING CHARTER 

"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication 

Interests" 

Thursday, March 29, 2012 

9:30 a.m. 11 :30 a.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

On Thursday March 29, 2012, the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight will hold an 

oversight hearing to examine various models for disseminating federally funded research and 

their corresponding effects on the scientific process. Federally funded research is accessed 

through an increasing variety of methods beyond the traditional scholarly journal maintained by 

a scientific society that is made available only through a paid subscription. Some of the push 

towards greater public access stems from increasing complaints about the widely varying 

subscription costs of journals. I 

Advocates have urged Congress to require federally funded research to be made available online 

to the public with limited or no access restrictions. Some longstanding journals have switched to 

this model while other journals and their publishers prefer their existing business models. They 

fear that switching to a business model with greater public access will not generate enough 

income to replace existing subscription revenue and will threaten their viability. Some highly 

specialized journals have already switched to business models with greater public access 

utilizing long-term financial commitments by their institutional subscribers to replace 

subscription revenue. New journals based upon minimal or no access restrictions have grown in 

number during the past decade. 

Background 

The federal government funds 31 % of all R&D conducted in the U.S., compared to 62% by 

business entities and the remaining 7% by universities, local and state governments, and other 

non-profit organizations.2 This federally funded research is conducted by federal employees, 

private companies, and public institutions such as universities and research centers. With the 

exception of biomedical and defense research, most federally funded research is funded by 

federal agencies under the Committee's primary jurisdiction. 

I The upper range of journal pricing appears to be around $30.000 per year as cbarged by Wiley & Sons for some 

versions of annual online access to The Journal of Comparative Neurology. 

2 "Science and Engineering Indicators 2012." NSF.gov. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. 

<http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seindI2/start.htm>. See Appendices B and C. 
4 

One of the primary goals of federal research and development funding is the wide dissemination 

of robust research in a variety offields.3 When made available to others through rcsearch 

articles and other means, this research can then be used as a building block for future research 

efforts or be commercialized in some way. Prior to the Internet, access to, and dissemination of, 

research papers was accomplished through publication in a research journal available to 

subscribers of that journal. With the advent of widespread Internet access, the traditional journal 

publishing model began to change to focus less on printed access and more on online access that 

still requires an access charge. 

In recent years, a movement has developed to allow anyone to access federally funded research 

for no additional cost. The rationale being that free access should be permitted because federal 

taxpayers have already paid to fund the research. Others point out that any effort to force 

specific models of access, such as free or low cost access, will threaten important components of 

the existing publishing system, especially the financial health of smaller journals whose revenues 

fund the operation of affiliated scientific societies. The intellectual property rights of journals to 

control copying and distribution of their copyrighted works may also be harmed by federal open 

access mandates. 

Parties interested in how federally funded research is accessed include: 

• Researchers that use federal funds to conduct research and want their articles published, 

not only to add to the scientific body, but also to demonstrate their skills and knowledge 

in the topic area. 

• Journals and their societies that are responsible for the publication and distribution of 

research papers that have been peer reviewed and edited by the journal. 

• Policy advocates and commercial entities who want to understand the science used as a 

basis for proposed federal action. 

• Taxpayers who want access to the research funded by their tax dollars for reasons that 

range from their own investigation into medical issues that impact them or their families 

to small businesses that do not have large research and development resources. 

The Roles and Interests of the Federally Funded Researcher 

Researchers interested in using federal funds to undertake research apply for research grants 

from federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation. According to the NSF, the 

agency receives 40,000 funding applications per year of which 11,000 are funded. Rules 

applicable to most research grant recipients require the creation of a research paper based upon 

the research. 4 

Researchers want to be published for several reasons beyond their desire to expand scientific 

knowledge. For example, university tenure often depends upon the volume of publishing. 

Publishing can attract additional grants based upon the initial research. There is also the prestige 

factor in publishing articles in highly regarded journals that are then cited by other researchers. 

3 For example, Section 203(a)(3) of the Space Act of 1958, as amended, directs NASA to "provide for the widest 

practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof." 

4 Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide, NSF 11-1, October 2010. 

2 
5 

The Roles and Interests of a Journal and its Governing Society 

Journals and their societies vary significantly in size and budget, generally driven by the number 

of researchers in that field. Societies are advocates for science in their field of study, hosting 

annual conferences and identifYing grant and career opportunities for researchers in that field. 

Their journals are usually considered the most authoritative in that particular field of study. 

Journals and their editors can serve as gatekeepers to particular areas of science through their 

own efforts and the decisions of peer review panels. This is viewed positively by traditional 

societies because poorly written or duplicative scientific papers can be weeded out prior to 

entering the peer review system that would waste the time of other researchers. In contrast, some 

advocates of greater public access argue that unconventional approaches to science may not be 

recognized by conservative journal editors so that the best option is simply to make all research 

available to let the reader decide what is important, accurate, and relevant. 

Based upon a Carnegie Commission definition, OMB in 2004 defined peer review in its Final 

Information Quality Bulletin for Peer Review as "a form of deliberation involving an exchange 

of judgments about the appropriateness of methods and the strength of the author's inferences."s 

In essence, the quality of the review process depends upon the skills and interest of these 

"peers." The peer review process has been in existence since 1731 when the Royal Society of 

Edinburgh published Medical Essays and Observation.6 At the time, the reviewers ofthese 

articles were individuals considered by the editor to be the "most versed in these matters." 

The vast majority of journals still use the peer review process, but it is not a perfect system. The 

peer review process provides: 

• An initial elimination by the journal editor of articles that do not meet commonly 

accepted scientific principles. 

• An in-depth review of a journal topic conducted by those already knowledgeable about 

the topic. 

• An ability to identifY some research fraud, misconduct, and integrity issues. 

Potential problems with the peer review process include: 

• Choices of peer reviewers by the journal editor that are not sufficiently knowledgeable 

about the topic of that journal article. 

• Any bias or lack of objectivity by one or more individuals on the peer review panel. 

• No guarantees that all scientific fraud, misconduct, or integrity issues have been 

identified. 

• Publication delays caused by the peer review process itself. 7 

Alternative peer review models have been tested by some journals, but it is unclear at this time 

whether these new models will replace or merely supplement the traditional peer review 

process.8 

5 Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, Risk and the Environment: Improving 

Regulatory Decision Making, Carnegie Commission, New York, 1993: 75. 

6 The Ups and Downs of Peer Review, Benos et al. Advances in Physiology Education, 31: 145-152,2007, p.145. 

7 Sieber, Joan (2006). Quality and value: How can we research peer review?, Nature. doi: 10.1 038/nature05006 

3 
6 

The Roles and Interests of Commercial Journal Publishers 

Societies that do not have the resources or interest in maintaining in-house publishing staff for 

their journals that may only be published a few times per year can outsource the work to larger 

commercial publishers. Under this system, a percentage of revenues or a Hat fee is paid to the 

society. This system effectively merges the interests of both parties. 

Although many commercial publishers state that they are not opposed to greater public access, 

they are concerned about, and are often in opposition to, government mandates that would 

encourage or force a specific business model to be followed. They are also concerned with 

government efforts to force the publication of the version of the article that is edited and peer 

reviewed by the journal, the "version of record", instead of the version initially submitted by the 

researcher, the "accepted manuscript.,,9 Unlike a researcher who may have agreed to publish his 

work in a particular manner as a condition for receiving federal funds, journal publishers have 

not entered into any binding contracts or other agreements with federal agencies concerning their 

version of the article. Publishers believe that mandates requiring the version of record to be 

available for free either immediately or within a specific amount of time after initial publication 

in their journal is a violation of their intellectual property rights and threatens their basic business 

model. 10 

The Roles and Interests of Universities and Their Libraries 

Although some universities and their libraries have taken the lead in supporting open access 

models as part of their mission to be a repository for knowledge, universities may have several 

interests related to access to federally funded research. Researchers want greater access to 

federal funding so that more research can be undertaken; university libraries want their users to 

have the widest possiblc access to research; and university based publishers want to ensure 

continued income from their publications to fund their operations. In response to overall 

budgetary concerns, libraries have looked to their journal subscription costs as one area to reduce 

spending. With the increasing growth of free online journals, this pressure to further reduce 

spending on paid journal subscriptions is likely to increase further. 

Advocates for greater access point to the high subscription costs and profits oflarge commercial 

publishers as one reason to embrace open access models. For example, the largest for-profit 

journal publisher, Elsevier, publishes approximately 2,000 journals, some in partnership with 

scientific societies that outsource publication to Elsevier and share revenue. On annual revenue 

of2.058 billion pounds (approximately $3.3 billion) in 2011, Elsevier earned a profit of768 

million pounds (approximately $1.2 billion) for a profit margin of37%.11 Commercial 

publishers see this profit as earned from work done by the publisher in marketing and creating 

tools for societies to use to publish their journals, rather than a profit off of the research itself. 

8 Overview: Nature's peer review trial. Nature (2006) I doi:1O.1038/nature05535 

9 The definition of these terms is based upon the "Recommendations of the NISOI ALPSP Working Group 

on Versions of Journal Articles" available at 

http://www.niso.orglalllls/group public/download.php/48/Recommendations TeclmicalWG.pdf. 

JO Sec testimony of Allan Adler, American Association of Publishers, before the House Oversight and Government 

Reform Committee, July 29,2010. Available at http://oversighLhouse.gov/wllcontentlullloads120 12/0 1120 1 00729 Adler.lldf. 

II Reed Elsevier 2011 Annual Report. Half of this revenue is from the North American market. During the past five 

years, Elsevier revenue has increased by 37% while profits have increased by 61 %. 

4 
7 

The Taxpayer Interests 

With taxpayer funding responsible for approximately one third of all research and development 

in the nation, taxpayers have a vested interest in how their research dollars are used and how the 

results of research can be accessed. 12 Duplicative research wastes taxpayer resources that could 

be used for other purposes. Research that is duplicative or hard to locate is less beneficial than 

unique research that can be quickly used to accelerate scientific progress. Follow-on research 

continues expanding the scientific record and validates previous research in that area. This in 

turn bolsters confidence in the validity of the conclusions. 

The Foundations of Open Access 

In 1991, an online repository of physics articles was created in a service called "ArXiv", a 

database that has now grown to over 700,000 articles. 13 Noting the success of ArXiv and similar 

databases, a group of interested researchers carne together in Budapest, Hungary in February 

2002 under the auspices of the Soros Foundation and released the Budapest Open Access 

Initiative defining open access as: 

" '" we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to 

read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these 

articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for 

any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than 

those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on 

reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, 

should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to 

be properly acknowledged and cited." 14 

The European Union released a report on scientific publishing in 2005 that highlighted the 

societal and scientific benefits of open access models. I5 Today, there are over 7,500 open access 

journals accessible online. 16 

Gold Open Access (Journals) 

Gold open access is the term given to the publishing model by which the costs to publish an 

article are recouped by means other than subscription or access charges imposed upon the 

reader. 17 Although revenue from advertisements in the journal may be used to offset costs, the 

most common source of funding for this publishing model are fees collected in advance from the 

author or his sponsoring institution. These fees, sometimes called "page charges," "printing 

charges," or "publication charges," are used by the publishingjoumal to pay for arranging the 

peer review, final editing, and publication. Under this model, the researcher knows the 

12 National Science Foundation, &ience and Engineering Indicators 2012 (NSB 12-01), supra. 

IJ "The First Free Research-Sharing Site, ArXiv, Turns 20 With an Uncertain Future." - Wired Campus. Web. 27 

Mar. 2012. <http://chronicle.comlblogs/wiredcampus/the-first-free-research-shariug-site-arxiv-turns20/32778?sid=wc>. 

14 "Budapest Open Access Initiative." Budapest Open Access Initiative. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. 

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

IS "Digital Broadband Content: Scientific Publishing" OECD. DSTI/ICCP/IE(2004)IIlFINAL. 02 Sep. 2005. 

16 "Directory of Open Access Journals." Directory a/Open Access Journals. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. 

<http://www.doaj.orgl>. 

17 "Peter Suber, Open Access Overview." Open Access Overview. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. 

<http://www.earlham.edul-peters/fos/overview.htm>. 

5 
8 

applicable fees for gold open access journals before submitting a paper for possible publication. 

A review of current charges for gold open access journal finds a typical cost of several thousand 

dollars in charges to the author of the article. Charges in excess of five thousand dollars per 

paper appear to be rare. 18 

Federal guidelines permit the payment of such charges. Revised in May 2004, paragraph 34 of 

attachment B to OMB Circular A-87 states that: "Page charges for professional journal 

publications are allowable as a necessary part of research costs where: (1) The research papers 

report work supported by the Federal Government; and (2) The charges are levied impartially on 

all research papers published by the journal, whether or not by federally sponsored authors." 

OMB and individual federal agencies do not currently require publication in an open access 

journal although there is anecdotal evidence that there is pressure from funding agencies for 

authors to seek out journals with the lowest page charges, rather than journals of the author's 

choosing. For example, the library of CERN, Europe's Organization for Nuclear Research, that 

receives federal funds to support operations of the Large Hadron Collider states that it " ... 

encourages authors to publish in Open Access journals." 19 

Green Open Access (repositories) 

Green open access is the term given to publicly accessible self-archiving efforts by article 

authors or various host institutions. Under the green open access model, once an article is 

considered ready for public release, the author or his host institution deposits a copy of the article 

in a publicly accessible online database. The author may not have asked others to review the 

article prior to publication and the article may have already been published elsewhere. If peer 

review has not occurred, the "strength" of the article as viewed by others may not be as high as 

that of peer reviewed articles. The Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) is one 

example of such a repository. 20 

Current Federal Agency Efforts Concerning Public Access of Federally Funded Research 

The most significant role undertaken by the federal government relating to public access has 

been at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH operates PUBMED Central, a centralized, 

publicly accessible database containing 2.4 millionjoumal articles that have been submitted by 

3,000 journals who deposit some or all of the articles in their journals to the database.2! 

Another effort by federal agencies to enable greater public access to research funded in part by 

federal agencies, albeit much smaller in scale than PUBMED Central, has been a series of 

affirmative steps by the libraries offederal energy labs to participate in international collectives 

to support the move of a small group of selected physics journals to an open access model. The 

18 A comparison of charges from several publications can be found at 

http://www.biomedcentral.comiaboutiapccomparison. 

19 "OA and low cost journals: where to publish?" OA and low cost journals: where to publish? Web. 27 Mar. 2012. 

<ht1p:I/library.web.cem.chllibraryIOpenAccessIJoumals.htmll> 

20 "Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard: Opening Harvard Research." Digital Access to Scholarship at 

Harvard: Opening Harvard Research. Weh. 27 Mar. 2012. <ht1p:I/dash.harvard.edu/>. 

21 "PUBMED CentraL" National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Web. 27 

Mar. 2012. <hl1p://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/>. 

6 
9 

Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAp3

) is a 

worldwide consortium of: 

• High-energy physics funding agencies 

High-energy physics laboratories 

Leading national and international libraries and library consortia.22 

SCOAp3 began with a 2007 proposal of interested groups including physics scientists to move a 

small group of journals focusing on high-energy physics and related fields to an open access 

model. The goal was to replace each journal's income from publications and access charges with 

guaranteed sources of annual dues from the coalition members in return for the chosen journals 

to move to an open access model. In the U.S., SCOAp3 partners are primarily universities, but 

the following Department of Energy labs are also members through their respective libraries: 

• Argonne National Laboratory 

• Fermilab 

• Los Alamos National Laboratory 

• Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory - University of California, Berkeley 

• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 

• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory 

• Savannah River National Laboratory 

• Stanford Linear Accelerator Center 

• Thomas Jefferson LaboratorY3 

Efforts to convert several physics journals to an open access model are now underway. Dues 

from SCOAp3 partners will be calculated based upon the nationality of the articles published in 

the covered journals during the year 2005. For U.S. libraries and national labs, the U.S. share of 

the overall cost would be 24% although the financial contribution of DOE labs is far less than 

1 % of the overall cost. 24 

Previous Committee Activity 

In June 2009, then Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon asked 

interested parties to meet under the auspices of the Committee to discuss scholarly publishing 

issues and develop, to the greatest extent possible, recommendations for how public access to 

journals with content derived from federally funded research could be increased.25 An ad-hoc 

group called the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was formed. The participants included 

representatives from academia, research librarians, journal publishers, and researchers in the arca 

of library and information science. Committee and OSTP staff also joined the participants. 

In January 2010, the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable released a 25-pagc report containing cight 

recommendations as follows: 

1. Agencies should work in full and open consultation with all stakeholders, and with 

OSTP, to develop their public access policies 

22 "SCOAp3" SCOAP'. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. <http://scoap3.org> 

23 "SCOAP1US." SCOAP'. Web. 27 Mar. 2012. <http://scoap3.org/scoap3us_alpha.html> 

24 Ibid. 

25 The charge to the group can be found at httr>:llw\Vw.aau.eduiWorkArea/Do\VnloadAsset.aspx?id~9666. 

7 
10 

2. Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public 

access 

3. Policies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability 

4. Every effort should be made to have the version of record as the version to which free 

access is provided 

5. Government agencies should extend the reach of their access policies through voluntary 

collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders 

6. Policies should foster innovation in the research and educational use of scholarly 

publications 

7. Government public access policies should address the need to resolve the challenges of 

long-term digital preservation 

8. OSTP should establish a public access advisory committee 

These recommendations were supported by 13 of the 15 roundtable participants. The two 

dissenters from the roundtable recommendations were the representatives from Elsevier and 

PLoS, the Public Library of Science, an open access publisher. 

Following the release of these recommendations, the America Competes Reauthorization Act of 

2010 tasked the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to "establish a working group 

under the National Science and Technology Council with the responsibility to coordinate Federal 

science agency research and policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of 

the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly 

publications, supported wholly, or in part, by funding from the Federal science agencies.,,26 The 

working group was required to submit a report to Congress within one year after enactment. 

OSTP collected 378 public comments for this report that is expected to be submitted to Congress 

within the next few weeks.27 

Related Legislation 

Three pieces oflegislation that focus on this issue have been introduced in the I 12th Congress. 

On December 16, 2011, H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act of2011 was introduced and referred 

to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.28 On February lih, 2012, the 

Federal Research Public Access Act of2012 was introduced in the House and Senate as H.R. 

4004 and S. 2096.29 H.R. 4004 was referred to the House Oversight and Government Reform 

Committee and S. 2096 was referred to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs 

Committee. No hearings or other legislative action have occurred on any of the legislation. 

H.R. 3699 and H.R. 40041 S. 2096 take opposite approaches to public access offederally funded 

research. H.R. 3699 effectively prohibits federal agencies from adopting open access mandates. 

In contrast, H.R. 4004 1 S. 2096 requires federal agencies with extramural research expenditures 

of over $100 million to adopt specific policies that result in free public online access to peer26 Section 103 ofP.L. 111-358. 

27 "Request for Infonnation: Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research," 

76 FR 68517, November 4, 2011. Submitted comments can be found at 

http://www.whitehotlse.gov/administrationieop/ostp/librarv/publicaccess. 

28 The sponsor ofH.R. 3699 is Mr. Issa of California. 

29 The sponsor ofH.R. 4004 is Mr. Doyle of Pennsylvania. The sponsor of the Senate companion bill is Senator 

Cornyn of Texas. 

8 
11 

reviewed articles not later than six months after publication in peer-reviewed journals, shortening 

the current NIH requirement. 

Intellectual Property 

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power "To promote the Progress 

of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive 

Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." All publishers, journal or otherwise, rely 

upon U.S. copyright law, codified at Title 17 of the U.S. Code, as the basis for an ownership 

right that can be enforced in federal court. Although U.S. copyright law is detailed, for the 

purposes of this issue, the most relevant provisions of copyright law are the statutory rights to 

control uses of copyrighted works and defenses to infringement of those rights.3o 

All versions of a research paper and various versions of the related journal article are protected 

by U.S. copyright law. Under the traditional journal system, authors typically continue to own 

the copyright to their original version, but assign a non-exclusive right to the journal to 

reproduce the article, either in its initial form or, most commonly, after changes made due to peer 

review and journal editing and formatting. The journal then typically owns the copyright in the 

peer-reviewed, journal-edited version. Determining which version should be made available to 

the public for free is a major issue of concern for all parties since the version of record is 

considered the most authoritative. 

Commercial ~ublishers depend upon strong intellectual property protections to protect their 

publications. I Efforts by the government to force joumals to retroactively make available their 

copyrighted articles on the Internet for public access could potentially run afoul of the takings 

clause of the U.S. Constitution. However, should a federal agency prospectively require 

recipients of federal funds to ensure that the publication of their work was made in an open 

access manner as a condition for receipt of federal funding for the research, a takin~s complaint 

would likely not be successful. The latter approach is the one taken so far by NIH. 2 However, 

this effectively forces journals to yield their intellectual property rights in the peer reviewed 

30 17 U.S.C. 106 identifies six rights of copyright owners, the first three of which are directly relevant: 

(I) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords; 

(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; 

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, 

or by rental, lease, or lending; 

17 U .S.C. 107 identifies limitations of these rights, "fair use", and uses a four part balancing test to determine if the 

defense can be used: 

(I) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit 

educational purposes; 

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work; 

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. 

There are other limitations contained within Title 17 including some focused on education and library users. 

31 See testimony of Ralph Oman, former Register of Copyrights, before the House Oversight and Government 

Reform Committee, July 29,2010. Available at http://oversighLhouse.gov/wpcontent/uploadsi20 12/0 1120 I 007290man.pdf. 

32 NIH open access policies, current and past, are available at httJJ:i/publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm. 

9 
12 

article to the NIH requirement or not accept an article funded by NIH for publication. In an 

attempt to address publisher concerns that these articles will be resold by others, NIH does 

prohibit the mass downloading ofPUBMED Central articles.33 

Data Access 

Printed research journals rarely include all of the supporting data used to support a research 

article due to space and printing costs, but in practice, scientists will often make the data 

available to other researchers upon request. Online access eliminates many publishing costs and 

some have argued that data created by federally funded research should also be made available 

so long as it does not conflict with other federal laws on privacy and confidentiality. This data 

could then be more easily used by other researchers and interested parties seeking to validate the 

data. There appears to be differing levels of support for greater access to the underlying data than 

for greater access to research journal articles. 

TimcDeJays 

Open access journals typically operate under a no delay system. Once an article is deerned ready 

for publication by the journal's editors, it is made available online immediately. Current law 

requires that "The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators 

funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's 

PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance 

for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of 

publication.,,34 This delay allows publishers to continue to sell subscriptions to those who want 

immediate access to newly published research without free competition from PUBMED Central. 

The need for a delay and the exact amount of its duration is a subject of debate with some 

advocates seeking immediate public release on the Internet while others seek to maintain a 

twelve month delay. Some have suggested alternative timeframes of a six or nine month delay in 

free access. 

Witnesses 

Dr. H. Frederick Dylla ** 

Executive Director and CEO, American Institute of Physics 

Mr. Elliot Maxwell 

Project Director for the Digital Connections Council, Committee on Economic 

Development 

Dr. Crispin Taylor ** 

Executive Director, American Society of Plant Biologists 

Mr. Stuart Shieber 

Director, Office for Scholarly Communications, Harvard University 

33 "PMC Copyright Notice." National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine. 

Web. 27 Mar. 2012. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/aboutlcopyrightl>. 

34 P.L. 110-161, Section 218. 

10 
13 

Mr. Scott Plutchak ** 

Director, Lister Hill Library at University of Alabama at Binningham 

** Dylla, Plutchak, and Taylor were members of the 2010 Scholarly Publishing Roundtable 

organized under the auspices of the Committee. 

II 
14 

Appendix A 

Section 103 of the America Competes Act of 2010 

SEC. 103. INTERAGENCY PUBLIC ACCESS COMMITTEE. 

(a) Establishment- The Director shall establish a working group under the National 

Science and Technology Council with the responsibility to coordinate Federal science 

agency research and policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of 

the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly 

publications, supported wholly, or in part, by funding from the Federal science agencies. 

(b) Responsibilities- The working group shall--

(1) identify the specific objectives and public interests that need to be addressed 

by any policies coordinated under (a); 

(2) take into account inherent variability among Federal science agencies and 

scientific disciplines in the nature of research, types of data, and dissemination 

models; 

(3) coordinate the development or designation of standards for research data, the 

structure of full text and metadata, navigation tools, and other applications to 

maximize interoperability across Federal science agencies, across science and 

engineering disciplines, and between research data and scholarly publications, 

taking into account existing consensus standards, including international 

standards; 

(4) coordinate Federal science agency programs and activities that support 

research and education on tools and systems required to ensure preservation and 

stewardship of all forms of digital research data, including scholarly publications; 

(5) work with international science and technology counterparts to maximize 

interoperability between United States based unclassified research databases and 

international databases and repositories; 

(6) solicit input and recommendations from, and collaborate with, non-Federal 

stakeholders, including the public, universities, nonprofit and for-profit 

publishers, libraries, federally funded and non federally funded research scientists, 

and other organizations and institutions with a stake in long term preservation and 

access to the results of federally funded research; 

(7) establish priorities for coordinating the development of any Federal science 

agency policies related to public access to the results of federally funded research 

12 
15 

to maximize the benefits of such policies with respect to their potential economic 

or other impact on the science and engineering enterprise and the stakeholders 

thereof; 

(8) take into consideration the distinction between scholarly publications and 

digital data; 

(9) take into consideration the role that scientific publishers play in the peer 

review process in ensuring the integrity of the record of scientific research, 

including the investments and added value that they make; and 

(l0) examine Federal agency practices and procedures for providing research 

reports to the agencies charged with locating and preserving unclassified research. 

(c) Patent or Copyright Law- Nothing in this section shall be construed to undermine any 

right under the provisions of title 17 or 35, United States Code. 

(d) Application with Existing Law- Nothing defined in section (b) shall be construed to 

affect existing law with respect to Federal science agencies' policies related to public 

access. 

(e) Report to Congress- Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the 

Director shall transmit a report to Congress describing--

(1) the specific objectives and public interest identified under (b)(1); 

(2) any priorities established under subsection (b)(7); 

(3) the impact the policies described under (a) have had on the science and 

engineering enterprise and the stakeholders, including the financial impact on 

research budgets; 

(4) the status of any Federal science agency policies related to public access to the 

results of federally funded research; and 

(5) how any policies developed or being developed by Federal science agencies, 

as described in subsection (a), incorporate input from the non-Federal 

stakeholders described in subsection (b)(6). 

(t) Federal Science Agency Defined- For the purposes of this section, the term 'Federal 

science agency' means any Federal agency with an annual extramural research 

expenditure of over $100,000,000. 

13 
16 

APIPenUIxB 
17 
18 

Chairman BROUN. The Subcommittee on Investigations and 

Oversight will now come to order. 

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to today’s hearing titled, ‘‘Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly 

Publication Interests.’’ You will find in front of you packets containing our witness panel’s written testimony, their biographies, 

and Truth-in-Testimony disclosures. I now recognize myself for five 

minutes for an opening statement. 

The formal review and communication of research finding dates 

back several centuries. Over this time, it has certainly served society very well. Scholars can argue over whether the existing structure, including peer review, is sufficient or if more can be done to 

ensure quality; but one thing is certain—society has greatly benefited from it. 

This structure and process, however, is organic and ever-changing. As we progress through the digital age, expectations of access 

to scientific findings are increasing, specifically research funded by 

taxpayers. Just as the Internet has challenged entrenched interests 

in other mediums such as news and music, so too has it affected 

scholarly publishing. The academic community and scholarly publishing interests must be flexible enough to adapt to our everchanging times. 

Society’s expectations of transparency are clearly increasing. 

Couple this trend with the fact that taxpayers rightfully expect access to research that they have funded, and you quickly realize 

that we all must work together to ensure that the various interests 

involved are treated fairly, and that ultimately, science and research are not harmed. 

This is no small matter. There are more than 25,000 peer-reviewed journals produced by over 2,000 publishers. These journals 

publish more than 1.5 million articles a year and earn revenues between $8 and $10 billion from their subscribers. This revenue 

funds over 100,000 jobs worldwide and 30,000 jobs in the United 

States alone. 

I have a lot of questions about how we should meet the challenges of expanding access to research without compromising the 

quality of the product or the rights of those involved in the process. 

The National Institute of Health public access policy provides a 

good opportunity for Congress to review the effectiveness of increased transparency on certain fields of research, as well as its 

impact on publishers. We must be mindful, however, that what 

works or does not work for NIH and biomedical research may not 

be appropriate for other agencies and scientific fields. Is there a 

one-size-fits-all policy that can cover the entire Federal Government, or do specific agencies and disciplines require different approaches? What does the taxpayer have a right to access—the 

manuscript that is produced by the researcher or the final product 

that is peer-reviewed? How does copyright law affect each of these? 

How long after release of a paper should the public have access? 

Immediately? Six months? A year? Does this challenge—does this 

change depending on the discipline or the agency? Should all information and data associated with the research be made public? Is 

this reasonable or even possible? Should limitations be placed on 
19 

access to prevent misuse? How should that be decided or who 

should decide it? I can go on and on with question after question. 

I am also curious about how public access has impacted the quality of the research. Has increased access impacted the number of 

citations and references, and is this even a valuable metric to determine effectiveness? Has greater access spurred additional inquiries or novel research? Has the public access affected innovation 

and commercialization? How do varying funding models for peer-review impact how researchers and agencies fund research? Are journals capable of adapting to meet new challenges presented by the 

digital age, transparency demands, and competitor models? 

As you can see I have lots of questions and I still could on, but 

one thing is absolutely crystal clear. Any effort to fundamentally 

change the way in which federal research is reviewed, vetted, 

transmitted, and communicated should benefit from the Science, 

Space, and Technology Committee’s input. We have been involved 

in investigating issues surrounding public access for a number of 

years and are uniquely qualified to evaluate the impacts on research, as well as on federal agencies. 

Representative Gordon, the former full Committee Chairman, 

brought together a number of stakeholders in 2009 in order to find 

a common ground, and in 2010, the ‘‘Scholarly Publishing Roundtable’’ issued a report containing several recommendations. We also 

tasked the Office of Science and Technology Policy to address the 

issue in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 and 

expect their results very soon. Today’s hearing is an extension of 

this longstanding engagement. 

I look forward to working with all of the interested parties, and 

I want to thank our all of our witnesses for appearing here today. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Broun follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SUBCOMMITTEE CHAIRMAN PAUL BROUN

The formal review and communication of research findings dates back several centuries. Over this time, it has certainly served society well. Scholars can argue over 

whether the existing structure, including peer review, is sufficient or if more can 

be done to ensure quality, but one thing is certain, society has greatly benefited 

from it. 

This structure and process, however, is organic and ever changing. As we progress 

through the digital age, expectations of access to scientific findings are increasing, 

specifically research funded by taxpayers. Just as the Internet has challenged entrenched interests in other mediums such as news and music, so too has it affected 

scholarly publishing. The academic community and scholarly publishing interests 

must be flexible enough to adapt to our ever-changing times. 

Society’s expectations of transparency are clearly increasing. Couple this trend 

with the fact that taxpayers rightfully expect access to research they have funded, 

and you quickly realize that we all must work together to ensure that the various 

interests involved are treated fairly, and that ultimately science and research are 

not harmed. 

This is no small matter. There are more than 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, produced by over 2,000 publishers. These journals publish more than 1.5 million articles a year, and earn revenues between $8 and $10 billion dollars from their subscribers. This revenue funds over 100,000 jobs worldwide—30,000 in the U.S. alone. 

I have a lot of questions about how we should meet the challenges of expanding 

access to research without compromising the quality of the product, or the rights 

of those involved in the process. The National Institute of Health (NIH) public access policy provides a good opportunity for Congress to review the effectiveness of 

increased transparency on certain fields of research, as well as its impact on publishers. We must be mindful, however, that what works or does not work for NIH 

and biomedical research, may not be appropriate for other agencies and scientific 

fields. Is there a one-size-fits-all policy that can cover the entire federal government, 
20 

or do specific agencies and disciplines require different approaches? What does the 

taxpayer have a right to access—the manuscript that is produced by the researcher, 

or the final product that is peer reviewed? How does copyright law affect each of 

these? How long after release of a paper should the public have access? Immediately? Six months? A year? Does this change depending on the discipline or the 

agency? Should all information and data associated with that research be made public? Is this reasonable or even possible? Should limitations be placed on access to 

prevent misuse? How should that be decided, and who should decide it? 

I’m also curious about how public access has impacted the quality of research. 

Has increased access impacted the number of citations and references, and is this 

even a valuable metric to determine effectiveness? Has greater access spurred additional inquiries or novel research? How has public access affected innovation and 

commercialization? How do varying funding models for peer-review impact how researchers and agencies fund research? Are journals capable of adapting to meet new 

challenges presented by the digital age, transparency demands, and competitor models? 

As you can see I have a lot of questions, but I think one thing is clear. Any effort 

to fundamentally change the way in which federal research is reviewed, vetted, 

transmitted, and communicated should benefit from the Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s input. We have been involved in investigating issues surrounding public access for a number of years, and are uniquely qualified to evaluate 

the impacts on research and federal agencies. Rep. Gordon, the former Committee 

Chairman, brought together a number of stakeholders in 2009 in order to find common ground, and in 2010 the ‘‘Scholarly Publishing Roundtable’’ issued a report containing several recommendations. We also tasked the Office of Science and Technology Policy to address this issue in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act 

of 2010 and expect their results soon. Today’s hearing is an extension of this longstanding engagement. 

I look forward to working with all of the interested parties, and want to thank 

our witnesses for appearing today. 

Chairman BROUN. I now recognize my good friend, the Ranking 

Member from New York, Mr. Tonko, for his opening statement. 

Mr. Tonko, you are recognized for five minutes. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

And I want to thank all of our witnesses for coming today to testify before our subcommittee. And further, let me thank you in advance for your patience. The schedule is going to be a little awkward today. 

In 2010, this committee adopted language that set the stage for 

enhancing public access to federally funded research. Since that 

time, two legislative proposals have emerged and have received the 

scientific community’s attention. At this point, I believe the language this committee included in the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act remains the best path forward. 

We have two competing public interests that play in the open access discussion. On the one hand, the taxpayers who provide support for research through grants provided by federal science agencies have an interest in having the research they fund deliver maximum public benefit. On the other hand, the public is not only interested in quantity; they want quality. 

The scientific publishing enterprise, working with the research 

community, academia, and the government traditionally has had 

an important role in ensuring that quality through the management of the peer-review process. We are on the cusp of an information revolution. We hear about the impacts of this revolution on 

print media every day. Digital technologies are making it easier to 

produce, distribute, search, access, and archive information. Scholars are embracing open-access journals for their articles and we 

have seen a series of schools follow the Harvard faculty’s model in 
21 

establishing publicly accessible faculty archives of their publications. 

More journals are looking to move to a business model based on 

author charges to remain viable with the move to open access. The 

NIH’s policy of making final submitted copies of manuscripts that 

result from NIH-funded research available on PubMed within 12 

months of publication. Is also driving change amongst publishers. 

The National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, 

significant funders in all nonmedical fields of science are both 

working on pilot programs that embrace an open access policy. 

With all of these changes underway, it is hard to see how traditional publishers will be able to survive without significantly rethinking their business model. This appears to be true for both the 

for-profit and not-for-profit publishers. 

So what is the proper role for the government in this evolutionary process? Clearly, we need to ensure that vital public interests 

in the United States research enterprise are indeed served. Any 

new system that emerges needs to facilitate data sharing and interoperability across fields and archives. In addition, it must provide 

for the long-term stewardship of the scientific record. We need to 

consider the implications for federal grants of moving to new publishing business models, including author-paid publication. 

Currently, federal grants help to support journal subscriptions 

through indirect costs on grants. Can we rely on the current policy 

path coupled to changing technology, emerging competition, and social norms among scholars to drive us steadily toward broader access to research results? It is too soon to tell. The landscape is dynamic and federal agencies have not yet completed their policy reviews and revisions. 

We are still waiting for the report we requested from OSTP. If 

we proceed to a legislative approach, we may end by creating more 

problems than we indeed solved. An abrupt end to the current system could drive some publishers out of existence. It could result in 

the loss of established journals and weaken professional scientific 

societies. These outcomes would be counterproductive to the goal of 

having high-quality research widely published and disseminated. 

How we produce, share, and preserve knowledge is on the edge of 

the greatest change in four centuries. There are many new opportunities for improvement and this is indeed an exciting time. Transitions are always unsettling but they offer a period for constructive experimentation. 

I believe we should take the time to hear from all interested parties, encourage the federal science agencies to move their efforts 

forward and refrain at this time from prejudging the best outcome 

through prescriptive legislation. We want to see the strongest possible system for sharing and preserving knowledge emerge from 

this transition period, and I look forward to hearing the perspectives and the concerns of our witnesses today and as this process 

moves forward. 

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Tonko follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SUBCOMMITTEE RANKING MEMBER PAUAL D. TONKO

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
22 

I want to thank all of our witnesses for coming today to testify before the Subcommittee. 

In 2010, this Committee adopted language that set the stage for enhancing public 

access to Federally-funded research. Since that time, two legislative proposals have 

emerged and have received the scientific communities’ attention. 

At this point, I believe the language this Committee included in the reauthorization of the American Competes Act remains the best path forward. 

We have two competing public interests at play in the open access discussion. 

On the one hand, the taxpayers who provide support for research through grants 

provided by Federal science agencies have an interest in having the research they 

fund deliver maximum public benefit. 

On the other hand, the public is not only interested in quantity. They want quality. The scientific publishing enterprise--working with the research community, academia, and the government traditionally has had an important role in ensuring that 

quality-through the management of the peer review process. 

We are on the cusp of an information revolution. We hear about the impacts of 

this revolution on print media every day. Digital technologies are making it easier 

to produce, distribute, search, access, and archive information. 

Scholars are embracing open access journals for their articles, and we have seen 

a series of schools follow Harvard faculty in establishing publically-accessible faculty 

archives of their publications. 

More journals are looking to move to a business model based on author charges 

to remain viable with the move to open access. NIH’s policy of making final submitted copies of manuscripts that result from NIH-funded research available on 

PubMed within 12 months of publication is also driving change among publishers. 

The National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy—significant 

funders in all non-medical fields of science-are both working on pilot programs that 

embrace an open access policy. 

With all these changes underway, it is hard to see how traditional publishers will 

be able to survive without significantly re-thinking their business model. This appears to be true for both for-profit and not-for-profit publishers. 

So, what is the proper role for the government in this evolutionary process? Clearly, we need to ensure that the vital public interests in the U.S. research enterprise 

are served. 

Any new system that emerges needs to facilitate data sharing and interoperability 

across fields and archives. In addition, it must provide for the long-term stewardship of the scientific record. 

We need to consider the implications for federal grants of moving to new publishing business models including author-paid publication. Currently, federal grants 

help to support journal subscriptions through indirect costs on grants. 

Can we rely on the current policy path, coupled to changing technology, emerging 

competition, and social norms among scholars to drive us steadily toward broader 

access to research results? 

It is too soon to tell. The landscape is dynamic and Federal agencies have not yet 

completed their policy reviews and revisions. We are still waiting for the report we 

requested from OSTP. 

If we proceed to a legislative approach, we may end by creating more problems 

than we solve. An abrupt end to the current system could drive some publishers out 

of existence. It could result in the loss of established journals and weaken professional scientific societies. These outcomes would be counterproductive to the goal of 

having high quality research widely published and disseminated. 

How we produce, share, and preserve knowledge is on the edge of the greatest 

change in four centuries. There are many new opportunities for improvement and 

this is an exciting time. Transitions are always unsettling, but they offer a period 

for constructive experimentation. 

I believe we should take the time to hear from all interested parties, encourage 

the Federal science agencies to move their efforts forward, and refrain at this time 

from prejudging the best outcome through prescriptive legislation. 

We want to see the strongest possible system for sharing and preserving knowledge emerge from this transition period. I look forward to hearing the perspectives 

and concerns of our witnesses today and as this process moves forward. 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Mr. Tonko. 

If there are any other Members who wish to submit additional 

opening statements, your statements will be added to the record at 

this point. 
23 

Chairman BROUN. At this time, I would like to introduce our 

panel of witnesses—Dr. H. Frederick Dylla, the Executive Director 

and CEO of the American Institute of Physics; Mr. Elliot Maxwell, 

Project Director for the Digital Connections Council on the Committee on Economic Development. Boy, that is a mouthful. Dr. 

Crispin Taylor, the Executive Director of the American Society of 

Plant Biologists; Mr. Stuart Shieber, the Director of the Office for 

Scholarly Communication at Harvard University; and Mr. Scott 

Plutchak, the Director of Lister Hill Library at the University of 

Alabama in Birmingham. 

As our witnesses should know, spoken testimony is limited to 

five minutes each, after which the members of the committee will 

be—will have five minutes each to ask questions. Your written testimony will be included in the record of the hearing. 

It is the practice of this Subcommittee on Investigations and 

Oversight to receive testimony under oath. Do any of you have an 

objection to taking an oath? Okay. I see everybody’s head shake 

side-to-side indicating ‘‘no.’’ So let the record reflect that all witnesses are willing to take oath. 

You may be represented by counsel. Do any of you have counsel 

here today? Also everyone indicated that they do not have counsel, 

so let the record reflect as such. 

If all of you would now please stand and raise your right hand. 

Do you solemnly swear or affirm and tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you, God? 

Thank you. You may be seated. 

Let the record reflect that all the witnesses participating have 

taken the oath. 

Now, I recognize our first witness, Dr. Dylla. 

STATEMENT OF H. FREDERICK DYLLA, 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND 

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, 

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS 

Dr. DYLLA. Chairman Broun, Ranking Member Tonko, and members of the committee, good morning. I am Fred Dylla, the Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics. AIP is 

a not-for-profit publisher of scholarly research and an umbrella organization of over ten scientific societies that includes over 135,000 

scientists. Before taking on this job five years ago, I was a practicing physicist, so I am keenly aware that innovation and discovery depend on access to research. 

Today’s hearing is addressing the essential question of the appropriate role of government in facilitating public access to taxpayerfunded research. Recently, there has been intense debate over public access, which is the ability for anyone to readily access scholarly 

research. All parties in this debate agree that enhanced public access is a good thing, is good for the economy; it is good for science. 

My main message to you today is that the current system of 

scholarly communications is working. More journals are reaching 

more readers in more usable formats than ever before. Stakeholders have been able to make significant strides toward increasing access even while recognizing there are no quick fixes where 

one size fits all models. 
24 

As the public demand for free electronic information grows, however, the debate on how to pursue public access has intensified. Financial concerns lie at the heart of this issue. The argument is if 

the taxpayers fund the research, shouldn’t the public have access 

to it? And the answer is of course. But in the world of scholarly 

publishing, freely available does not necessarily mean free of cost. 

It takes significant investments for publishers to give value to that 

research and communicate it in a meaningful way. For AIP this amounts to about $2,000 per article, which includes 

the rigorous peer-review process that we manage, the editing, the 

production, permanently archiving, and much more. All the parties 

agree that these components add essential value and enable scientific progress. This committee has weighed in on this issue and 

your solution is working. Last year, legislation was enacted, Section 103 of the COMPETES Act, that calls for all stakeholders, including publishers, to work together to increase public access to 

scholarly publications, grantee reports and associated data. 

Since that time, important collaborations have formed and we 

have made significant progress. Partnerships with the National 

Science Foundation and the Department of Energy have produced 

pilot programs that link grantee reports to publications, support 

data mining across agency and publisher platforms, and provide 

new tools and methodology for identifying publicly funded work. 

Publishers have the expertise to drive these projects, saving the 

funding agencies money. Innovative publication technology, efficient business practices, and connectivity to the international publishing community enable the government to show results quickly, 

increasing taxpayer access to publicly funded work. 

Due to the complex and nuanced nature of this issue, proposals 

that significantly distort the current system of scholarly communications could even be harmful. Recently, the two most touted 

models—one-size-fits-all and mandated open access—divert the 

progress that has been made over the past few years and could 

even jeopardize the ultimate goal of enhanced public access. 

How are these proposals harmful? First, a single business model 

that mandates free public access does not take into account the 

rich diversity in both the science and scientific publishing. A successful approach in one scientific discipline may unfairly hinder another. This could jeopardize many sectors of the $3 billion-a-year 

component of the U.S. publishing industry, which employs 30,000 

people in this country. But secondly, a blanket approach that imposes open access in all journals would significantly impede our approach and other publishers’ abilities to ensure quality and the 

value of published scholarly research. 

Fortunately, the current system is working. The natural pressures of the marketplace continue to foster innovative products and 

dissemination methods. Within the scholarly publishing realm, new 

publishers, new journals, new business models are continually 

emerging signaling a healthy, competitive marketplace. These innovations date back to our Nation’s birth with Ben Franklin—a scientist, a publisher, an entrepreneur who exemplifies our country’s 

tradition of scholarly publishing and free enterprise. Today, the 

government has given us the tools to continue this tradition so we 

can pursue innovation and foster scientific discovery. 
25 

Within the current framework, I am confident that public access 

to all the results of scientific research will continue to flourish and 

grow. 

Thank you. I am honored to be among such a distinguished committee and panel of witnesses. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Dylla follows:] 
26 

Federally Funded Research: 

Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests 

Written testimony submitted to the 

House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, 

Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight 

March 29, 2012 

Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2318 

10 a.m. EDT 

H. Frederick Dylla, Ph.D. 

Executive Director and CEO 

American Institute of Physics 
27 

Executive Summary 

The American Institute of Physics (AlP) appreciates the opportunity to submit testimony as part 

of the House Committee on SCience, Space and Technology, Subcommittee on Investigations 

and Oversight hearing on "Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly 

Publication Interests." 

AlP strongly supports the broad dissemination of scholarly research, which includes public 

access to journal articles, data, and related information. It is our position that the America 

COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-358) contains the best and most effective 

framework to broaden public access. Indeed, recent collaborative efforts by AlP, other scientific 

societies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Energy, 

and the National Science Foundation have made significant progress toward these goals under 

the comprehensive structure outlined in America COMPETES. 

Due to the complex and highly nuanced nature of this issue, new legislation or government 

policies that force free public access through a single dissemination business model would harm 

the collaborative process that stakeholders have worked so hard to achieve. Moreover, a 

blanket approach to public access would diminish the quality and value of published scholarly 

research and actually detract from achieving the goal of increasing access to scholarly 

literature. 

Notes on Written Testimony Structure: The bulk of this written testimony is attached in the 

form of AlP's December 2011 responses to two Requests for Information (RFls) from the White 

House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which capture comprehensively AlP's 

positions on the key policy and technical issues in the public access debate. 

About AlP and Issue Relevance 

AlP is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit membership corporation founded in 1931 for the purpose of 

promoting the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics and its application to 

human welfare. AlP collaborates with its ten Member Societies to provide resources for 

activities such as scholarly publishing and outreach to the science community and the general 

public. Publishing scientific journals is the primary means by which scientific societies 

communicate advances in research to the community. Publishing is also AlP's primary source of 

revenue, supporting its outreach activities, which serve the broad physics community and the 

general public. 

AlP is an umbrella organization of ten Member Societies that collectively represent a broad 

cross-section of more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators in the global physical 

science community. With an extensive catalog of top-cited journals, AlP is one of the world's 

leading publishers in the physical sciences. AlP publishes 13 journals; two magazines, including 

its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AlP Conference Proceedings series. In keeping 

with its goal to increase access to and use of its journals, AlP reinvests its journal revenue in 

innovative electronic publishing technologies for scholarly journals and offers full-solution 

publishing services for many of its Member Societies. 

H,F. Dylla testimony; March 29, 2012 2 
28 

In 2011, AlP published more than 15,000 scholarly articles in its journals. AlP also published 

more than 5,000 additional articles for its Member Societies for which it is the publisher of 

record (American Association of Physics Teachers; Acoustical Society of America; American 

Association of Physicists in Medicine; AVS: Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and 

Processing; and The Society of Rheology). 

Four AlP Member Societies (American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union, 

American Physical Society, and The Optical Society) manage their own publications, which 

collectively published an additional 39,000 articles in 2011. AlP and its Member Societies 

published approximately one quarter of the articles in the discipline of physics 

(approximately 240,000) in 2011. 

AlP's journal revenues finance its entire publishing process, which includes highly skilled 

editorial management employing over 130 international scientific editors; end-toend manuscript oversight with authors; coordination of the essential peer review process 

(which ensures scientific integrity); translation of the text and figures into the form visible on 

the published page; final publication (both in the traditional print journal and online and mobile 

versions); the development, dissemination, and maintenance of searchable and accessible 

journal databases; and preservation of the digital version throughout the coming decades. This 

enterprise requires extensive human and capital resources: for its archival journals, AlP expends 

more than $40 million annually for the entire operation, including editorial, production, 

bibliographic tagging, printing, online-hosting, and archiving tasks. AlP employs more than 200 

people at our facilities in Melville, N. Y., and College Park, Md., who manage and support our 

publishing operations. 

AlP uses the net revenues from its journal publishing operations to support its Physics 

Resources Center. This Center provides a variety of outreach services for the scientific 

community and the general public, including: media services for translating summaries of 

journal articles for dissemination in lay language media channels; operation of the Niels Bohr 

library and Archive for preserving the history of the physical sciences; the Statistical Research 

Center, which tracks education and workforce statistics for physical scientists; a comprehensive 

science news service for educating the general publiC about advances in research; and 

administration of the Society of Physics Students on more than 700 university and college 

campuses [see AlP's Annual Reports for details: http://www.aip.org/aip/reports.htmlj. The $21 

million in operating expenses to run these programs is partially offset by net revenues from 

AlP's journal publishing operations. 

About Dr. Dylla 

Since 2007, H. Frederick Dylla has served as Executive Director and CEO of AlP. Previously, Dylla 

served as Chief Technology Officer and as Associate Director at the Department of Energy's 

Jefferson Lab, where he spearheaded the Free Electron Laser (FEL) program. From 1975 to 

1990, he held various positions at the Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics 

Laboratory, where he helped develop technology for nuclear fusion reactors, particle 

accelerators, and materials processing for the microelectronics industry. He received his Ph.D. 

in physics from MIT (1975), is a Past President and Fellow of the American Vacuum Society 

H.F. DyUa testimony; March 29, 2012 3 
29 

(AVSj, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the 

Advancement of Science. During his scientific career, Dylla has been an author of more than 

190 peer-reviewed publications in scholarly literature and has served as an editor and on the 

editorial board of several journals and monograph series. He presently serves on the boards of 

the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers and 

the International Association of SCientific, Medical and Technical Publishers. In 2009, Dylla 

helped organize and participated in the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable under the aegis of the 

U.S. House Science and Technology Committee. The Roundtable developed consensus 

recommendations for the development of public access policies for scholarly data and 

publications. 

Access to Journal Content 

Scholars and research scientists access AlP published content in very large numbers through 

several different channels, including subscription or license fees which are generally paid by 

their institutional libraries. AlP's subscription prices are competitively priced within the physics 

publishing market. With more than 13 million full-text downloads in 2011, the subscriptionbased cost per download for AlP content is in the $2-3 range, representing outstanding value 

for journals that are in the top rank of their class in terms of scholarly impact. AlP has also 

responded to budget challenges faced by the library market by offering other access models 

such as a low-price article rental program that has since been adopted by more than 40 other 

scholarly publishers. Overall, AlP provides a number of cost-effective and efficient means to 

access high quality peer reviewed content. Some of these access options are detailed further in 

the attachments. 

AlP has joined a diverse group of journal publishers that make their articles freely available to 

academics and others in 100 developing countries. Some well-known programs include the 

United Nation's HINARI, AGORA, and OARE Research4Life programs, HighWire's Developing 

Economies Program, and JSTOR's Developing Nations Initiative. Additional programs include 

those of EIFL, INASP, and TEEAl. For descriptions of these and more, see 

www.library.yale.edu/~lIicense/develop.shtml. 

Notably, one of AlP's Member Societies, the American Physical Society, spearheaded an 

initiative that allows public access to all of their journals by making them available at no charge 

through public libraries and high schools around the country. So far, more than 600 libraries 

have signed up for this service. 

Many librarians have become advocates of open access in response to cost pressures induced 

by the rapid growth in journals, proliferation of new journals in niche subjects, and the high 

relative price of some journals. Since library subscribers are AlP's most important customers, 

AlP and its Member Societies are very sensitive to their concerns and believe that the inclusive 

framework established under the COMPETES law can help address their concerns without 

threatening the quality and essential services to the scholarly community provided by scholarly 

publishing. 

H.F. Dylla testimony; March 29, 2012 4 
30 

Rapidly Changing and Vibrant Marketplace 

Within the scholarly publishing realm, new publishers, journals, and business models are 

continually emerging, signaling a healthy, competitive marketplace. It is AlP's belief that the 

government should support and encourage this diversity through its actions and policies via 

mutually beneficial partnerships with publishers, which would contribute to the U.S. economy 

and maximize the productivity of the scientific enterprise. This ability of scientific publishers to 

experiment with different publication, business, and access models is essential and assures the 

vitality, diversity, and effectiveness of the scholarly communication marketplace, leading to 

scientific and technological advances. This tradition of innovation in communications in the free 

market is a hallmark of the intersection of research, entrepreneurialism, and publishing going 

back to the earliest days of our nation. 

Freely Available, But Not Free of Cost 

AlP understands the enthusiasm for open access for the obvious reason that it increases access 

to research, which is at the core of our mission. AlP has been trying to build awareness among 

all affected parties that while open access may mean freely available, the costs to assure the 

quality, rigor, discovery, and production value of scientific publishing are not zero. 

As Maria Leptin, the Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization, wrote in a March 

16, 2012 editorial in the journal Science: "Any transition to open access on a large scale will 

require a clear understanding of the financial challenges that will be faced. Put simply, 

publishing costs money, and open access does not mean 10r free' - someone must foot the bill." 

Currently, more than 25,000 scholarly journals are being published worldwide, and institutional 

subscriptions generate income for 90 percent of these titles. For most of the remaining 10 

percent, authors or sponsoring agencies pay an upfront fee per article. These articles are 

posted on the web without subscription barriers as soon as they are published. 

Potential legislative and Policy Impacts 

Current policy efforts to increase public access have focused on two approaches: (a) accelerate 

the transition from the subscription model to the open access model or (b) mandate the release 

of subscription content after a specified embargo period. The NIH Public Access Mandate, 

which was introduced in 2008, requires scholarly articles to be posted on NIH's PubMedCentral 

website 12 months after publication, if any of the authors had NIH funding for any portion of 

the underlying research reported on in the articles. The proposed Federal Research Public 

Access Act (FRPAA), introduced in both houses of Congress last month would extend the 

release mandate to all disciplines represented by the eleven federal agencies that fund 

research and decrease the timeframe to 6 months. 

It is AlP's position that neither of these one-size-fits-all approaches is an appropriate solution 

for the diverse array of journals published across all the disciplines represented by federally 

funded research efforts. The open access model is growing at a reasonable rate for fields where 

such a model is appropriate (Le., well-funded or fast-moving disciplines). Delayed-release 

models are not viable for fields where articles have citation lifetimes of years, such as 

mathematics, theoretical physics, and the social sciences. Additionally, the scholarly community 

H.F. Dylla testimony; March 29, 2012 5 
31 

should determine the methods of dissemination that are appropriate to their fields. Forcing the 

adoption of either model would likely cause significant harm to the enterprise of scholarly 

publishing. Furthermore, forcing the adoption of these models is not necessary, given the 

natural pressures of the marketplace that continually drive the industry to evolve and innovate 

a wide array of products and dissemination methods. 

Agency/Publisher Pilot Projects Launched 

The most appropriate role for the federal government is to encourage federal agency/publisher 

partnerships, examples of which have arisen as a direct result of COMPETES. AlP has been a 

leading participant in organizing working groups that are proposing and planning partnerships 

with NSF and DOE on access, linking of grantee reports to publications, data mining across 

agency/publisher databases, tools and methodology for identifying publicly funded work, and 

potential pilot projects in the above areas. 

Specifically, the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is collaborating with 

journal publishers to improve DOE's ability to demonstrate the outcomes of the research it 

funds. This involves engaging with publishers to identify and broaden access to the journal 

articles reporting on research funded by DOE. To this end, OSTI has embarked on a pilot project 

to enhance journal article full-text searching, with the intent to make citations of DOE-funded 

journal articles available in the search and retrieval applications operated by OSTI. 

In this pilot project, the scholarly publisher Wiley provides citations to OSTI, including abstracts 

and hyperlinks to a landing page for the publisher's version of the article. Wiley provides the 

full text of the article for use in OSTI's archive, which improves search precision and recall. 

Through this existing infrastructure OSTI would make the journal publisher's full text 

searchable. 

One of the most important tasks that the publishing community has undertaken (funded by 

subscription and other revenue) is ensuring the proper tagging of articles, verification and 

disaggregation of author names, and references. An initiative in this vein is the FundRef 

project-a collaboration involving CrossRef (a Digital Object Identifier registration agency), 

several funding agencies and publishers to establish protocols for identifying the funding 

agencies associated with journal articles. OSTI is working with CENDI (a federal scientific and 

technical information managers group) members to have a standard list of agencies so there will 

be no ambiguity for agency names. 

CrossRef has agreed to add two new metadata elements to the CrossRef database, which would 

apply to each journal article: funding agency identity and grant number. FundRef pilot 

demonstrations with at least five major publishers including AlP will be deployed next year. 

Similarly, officials at NSF are assuming a leadership role in initiating one-to-two-year pilot 

projects on expanded public access to research results; these involve universal identifiers for 

better search results and linking between NSF and publisher databases. 

H.F. Dylia testimony; March 29. 2012 6 
32 

The NSF Directorate for Math and Physical Sciences is in discussions with AlP and the American 

Astronomical Society to establish a pilot project to link the data behind figures and tables with 

publications. 

Based on these valuable experiences, other agencies and publishers can gain valuable insight on 

how future collaborations might be structured to promulgate the success of these initial 

agency-publisher partnerships. 

The America COMPETES Act requires the U.S. federal agencies that fund scientific research to 

develop policies for access to and interoperability among databases, and archiving for data and 

publications that are derived from public funding. Publishers have valuable expertise that can 

help in this process, but only if publishing continues to be sustainable. Such collaboration 

between publishers and the government is already happening in ways that will increase public 

access to reports, data, and publications derived from federally funded research. These 

collaborative initiatives create efficiencies and cost savings for the funding agencies. 

Conclusion 

AlP believes that a uniform access policy or mandate for scholarly publications would be an 

ineffective approach. An overarching government-wide policy that would simply mandate a 

short publication embargo period would fail to take into account such key factors as the speCific 

needs of any given agency, the rapidly changing marketplace and nature of scholarly publishing, 

and the unique considerations ofthe various fields of science and the journals that serve them. 

The creative and thoughtful discussions that have been spurred by the existing America 

COMPETES law, organic market forces, and collaborative efforts already underway between 

publishers and several federal agencies, offer a pragmatic and productive route to success in 

broadening public access to the all the products of federally funded research: grantee reports, 

associated data, and the reSUlting peer-reviewed publications. These efforts reinforce the view 

of many in the scholarly publishing community that new legislation is not needed at this time. 

I believe-and the evidence from the post-COMPETES partnerships shows-that we are making 

real progress on the interrelated issues of access and interoperability among public and private 

information platforms and databases. 

H.F. Dylla testimony; March 29. 2012 7 
33 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Dr. Dylla. 

Mr. Maxwell, you are recognized for five minutes. 

STATEMENT OF MR. ELLIOT E. MAXWELL, 

PROJECT DIRECTOR, DIGITAL CONNECTIONS COUNCIL, 

COMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 

Mr. MAXWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member 

Tonko, Members of the Subcommittee. First, let me express my appreciation for the opportunity to testify today. My testimony today 

is based on a report, ‘‘The Future of Taxpayer Funded Research: 

Who Will Control Access to the Results?’’ which I wrote under the 

auspices of the Committee for Economic Development with generous support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. That 

report addresses the cost and benefits of the public access policies 

of the National Institutes of Health, as well as proposals to overturn or extend that policy. I would ask that a copy of the report 

be inserted into the record. 

Chairman BROUN. Certainly. Thank you. So ordered. 

[Visit http://www.emaxwell.net/linked/DCCReport—Final— 

Feb2012.pdf to view the report.] 

Mr. MAXWELL. For the last several years, I have served as 

Project Director of CED’s Digital Connections Council, and during 

this time, the Council has made several reports on how greater 

openness is enabled by the Internet and by the digitization of information. This kind of openness is in fact exemplified by the NIH 

public access policy. It makes it possible and it benefits from the 

availability of the articles that are made available. 

The policy has been in effect for nearly four years, but there are 

disagreements about its effect. Supporters have argued that it increased public access, substantial positive impacts on the progress 

of science, innovation, and economic growth and should be extended. Opponents are primarily, but not entirely, publishers of 

proprietary journals. And I want to make sure that people understand that there are publishers that are not proprietary but are 

open-access publishers. And so when people talk about publishers 

as if they were a single body, it is not an accurate way of depicting 

what the situation is. 

Primarily, publishers of proprietary journals have argued that increased public access will or have damaged the subscription-supported publishing business and will undercut peer review and may 

force journals to close or reduce the number of outlets. CED initiated this report because we wanted to try to get what the facts 

were, what the effects were, and rather than speculate about these 

things, to look at what is on the record after four years. And we 

think we have a kind of disinterested view of this because we are 

not in favor of one or another kind of dissemination. But the central question of the report was, how does the NIH policy and proposals to extend it or to overturn it affect the production and dissemination of high-quality science research. That seems to be the 

single most important thing to remember, that it is about the 

progress of science, innovation, and economic growth. It is not 

about the effect on any particular mode of dissemination. And so 

we wanted to look at it from that standpoint. 
34 

Now, we were concerned about the effects on different ways of 

disseminating research because only to the extent that they affect 

the production and dissemination of high-quality research. And 

quality, as Mr.—as the Chairman and Ranking Member have indicated, is an important issue but it is not necessarily equated with 

proprietary publishing. It is related to peer review and the different means of assuring quality. And we want to underline that. 

It is worth noting, as Fred has said, that all the parties agree 

about the importance of access. Proprietary publishers make a 

point in their arguments about their efforts to increase access to 

groups that are underserved. I would suggest that the question in 

some ways needs to be flipped around. What all parties also agree 

is that the NIH policy for public access has increased access. There 

is no dispute about that. So the question you face, I think, is to say 

we have a means and we know how to use it of increasing access. 

The issue now should be what do we need to do to limit that as 

opposed to how do we extend what we have now in the scholarly 

publishing journal to other federal agencies? Because we have both 

the means and the knowledge of how to increase access and we 

should start there and back off from that as opposed to saying how 

do we tweak what we have in those areas beyond the NIH? 

So it is not, I think, a matter of dispute about the value of access 

or a matter of dispute about the success of NIH. It is really only 

about, I think, the details of how it might be worked out in other 

areas. But we start with the presumption of access as opposed to 

the presumption that the publishers control access. And because we 

have a time of an extraordinary pressure on our budgets, we need 

to be thinking about how to get the most from the very large scientific investment by taxpayers in support of research. 

What we have found in looking at the literature was that increased public access accelerates progress in science by speeding up 

and broadening diffusion of knowledge, providing better access to 

more people—because as more people have access, more people can 

do something with it—increases the range and quality and variation of experiments that lead to better solutions. The more people 

have access, the different perspectives they bring more likely to 

have solutions than to narrow that. We have found that it has important benefits to authors because their work is more available 

and it increases the efficiency of the research enterprise because 

you can see what is being done and you can get as much as you 

can without making taxpayers pay twice for the research both in 

terms of the grants and in terms of subscriptions. 

We have looked at all of the evidence that we have about the impact on the scholarly publishing community and we found no evidence that public access as provided by the NIH policy has harmed 

the subscription journals. We found no persuasive evidence that increased public access threatens the ability to peer review. We found 

no persuasive evidence of a significant reduction in traditional publishing. We found only a small effect on the rate of growth of profits on the proprietary publishers, and that was in the midst of the 

largest recession we have had in years and years and years. None 

of even the—— 

Chairman BROUN. Mr. Maxwell, if you would go ahead. You are 

a little over time now and we are—— 
35 

Mr. MAXWELL. I am sorry. 

Chairman BROUN. —pressed for our time because we are going 

to have votes very quickly and I just want to try to get through 

as much of this testimony. So if you would summarize very quickly, 

I would appreciate it. 

Mr. MAXWELL. Absolutely. I think that we should recognize the 

very large benefits that exist and start from the premise of increasing access, and then, if necessary, dial that back. And we should 

think of the experience that people have had in the NIH and related biomedical world and start to move down to a shorter embargo, recognizing that there may be differences amongst the various 

disciplines. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Maxwell follows:] 
36 

Testimony of Elliot E. Maxwell 

Director, Digital Connections Council 

Committee for Economic Development 

March 29, 2012 

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology 

Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515 
37 

TESTIMONY OF ELLIOT E. MAXWELL BEFORE 

THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND OVERSIGHT OF THE 

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY 

THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

MARCH 29, 2012 

Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, 

First let me express my appreciation for the opportunity to testify today. The interest of 

the House Science Committee in this area is longstanding and deserves commendation. I 

am honored to be invited to share in the efforts to ensure that the taxpayers of this 

country obtain the greatest possible return on their investment in federally funded 

research. 

My testimony today is based on a report, "The Future of Taxpayer Funded Research: 

Who Will Control Access to the Results?" which I wrote under the auspices of the 

Committee for Economic Development (CED) with generous support from the Ewing 

Marion Kauffman Foundation. That report addresses the costs and benefits of the public 

access policies ofthe National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as proposals to overturn 

or extend that policy; it does not analyze or make recommendations regarding particular 

legislative proposals. I would ask that a copy of this report be included in the hearing 

record. 

I should make clear that I am testifying as the author of the report but do not speak for 

CED or any of its members or funders; the opinions I express today are my own. The 

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation exercised no control over the research or the 

findings, and neither CED nor I have any financial interest in the conclusions or 

recommendations. 

SOME BACKGROUND ON CED AND THE DIGITAL CONNECTIONS COUNCIL 

(DCC) 

CED is a non-profit, non-partisan business-led public policy organization. CED conducts 

research on major economic and social issues and actively informs and engages the 

business community in an effort to achieve policy reform for the good of the nation. 

Membership is made up of some 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders 

who lead CED's research and outreach efforts. 

For the last several years I have served as project director ofCED's Digital Connections 

Council (DCC), which is chaired by Paul Hom, former IBM Senior Vice President for 

Research and currently New York University Distinguished Scientist in Residence & 

Senior Vice Provost for Research. During this time CED has issued several DCC reports 

on how greater "openness" made possible by the digitization of information and the 

growth ofthe Internet can lead to increased benefits to society and how it can improve 

specific domains such as healthcare and higher education. 
38 

"Openness" as used in these reports can be thought of as a continuum from completely 

open--such as something posted to the World Wide Web and available to all without any 

restrictions--to completely closed--such as a formula written down but kept under a 

pillow and never shared. Openness has two aspects: accessibility and responsiveness. To 

the degree that information or processes are accessible--e.g. are available without need to 

pay a subscription or for the recipient to be at a particular place--they are more open. 

And to the extent that what is accessible is responsive--e.g. can be repurposed, and 

reused--they are more open. While achieving greater openness has many positive 

rewards, these reports all have stressed that careful thought should be given to 

determining the right degree of openness for the particular situation. Electronic health 

records, for example, should be open to all the medical personnel providing treatment to 

an individual, but not open to a landlord, and should be responsive to reports oflab test 

results but not alterable by anyone not authorized to do so. 

The results of greater openness made possible by digitization and the growth of the 

Internet can be seen in the rise of open source software, the development of open 

educational courseware, the emergence of open innovation, the global scientific 

collaboration in the Human Genome Project (HGP) and the immediate announcement of 

its results, and, most importantly for today's hearing, the NIH public access policy which 

was the subject of the report on the "Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research." 

SOME BACKGROUND ON THE NIH PUBLIC ACCESS POLICIES 

Progress in science is built upon the work of those who came before. Demonstrations of 

such progress in research could be found in published scientific journals that for several 

hundred years have been among the most important vehicles for the dissemination of new 

scientific knowledge. 

Until very recently modem scientific journals were funded almost entirely by institutional 

subscriptions; subscribers such as libraries and their users had access to new research 

results while others without subscription access had to wait for other means of knowledge 

diffusion to have access to this new knowledge. With the adoption of the NIH public 

access policies, an alternative and complementary model for access to NIH funded 

research results was given an enormous boost. 

The U.S. National Institutes of Health is the largest single funder of biomedical research 

in the world with a budget of $3 I billion that, through its grants making process, 

generates 90,000 articles each year. Since 2008 NIH's public access policy has required 

that its grantees place a copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication 

by a scientific journal in PubMed Central (PMC), an online digital repository open to all; 

the work would be available no later than 12 months after the version of record is 

published. In 2005, NIH had asked grantees to deposit their work voluntarily. By 2008 

only a small percentage of grantees--7%--had done so and NIH made deposit mandatory, 

a policy decision based on instructions to NIH in a law passed by Congress and signed by 

the President. 

2 
39 

PMC now includes more than 2.3 million full text manuscripts and articles and over a 

thousand journals now voluntarily deposit all of their articles into the database, whether 

or not they deal with NIH funded research. Over 500,000 unique visitors acccss PMC on 

a typical workday. 

The policy has been in effect for nearly four years but there are disagreements about its 

impact. Supporters of the policy have argued that the increased public access has 

substantial positive impacts on the progress of science, innovation and economic growth, 

and should be extended to cover extramural research funded by other major federal 

funders of unclassified scientific, technical, and medical (STM) research. Opponents, 

primarily but not entirely, publishers of proprietary STM journals, have argued that the 

increased public access has or will damage their subscription supported publishing 

businesses and, by so doing, will undercut the peer-review system. They have stated that 

the financial pressure may force publishers to close, and as a result, reduce the amount 

and quality of research by reducing the number of outlets for research, while at the same 

time undercutting their copyright interests. Publishers also argue that the manuscripts 

authored by researchers are not the direct result of the NIH funding and that NIH should 

be making public the reports filed by grantees pursuant to federal regulations. 

SOME BACKGROUND ON THE "THE FUTURE OF TAXPAYER-FUNDED 

RESEARCH; WHO WILL CONTROL ACCESS TO THE RESULTS?" 

CED initiated the report because the differing assertions about the impact ofthe NIH 

public access policy and the different proposals to extend or overturn it raised important 

public policy issues and were related to earlier efforts by the DCC. Unlike the debates 

over the policy around the time of its adoption, there were now nearly four years of 

experience with the policy on which to base conclusions. 

I'd like to make one point absolutely clear. The report is focused on the question of how 

the NIH public access policy, and its potential extension to other federally funded 

extramural research--or its reversal--might affect the development and dissemination of 

high quality scientific research and its benefits to our society. 

The impact ofthe policies on proprietary publishers (for profit or not for profit) or open 

access publishers (publishers that rcly on author payments rather than subscriptions) 

digital repositories or any particular means of disseminating knowledge was important 

(for the purposes of this analysis) only in so far as the impact would affect the 

development and dissemination of high quality research. This focus was chosen because 

the impact of the policy on the production and dissemination of knowledge is the central 

issue and of high public importance given the very substantial taxpayer expenditures in 

support of research and the enormous public benefits that can be gained from that 

research. 

The report does not dwell on the fundamental importance ofresearch to innovation and 

economic growth; that case has been made well by generations of economists, scientists, 

and others and is supported by both proponents and opponents of the NIH public access 

3 
40 

policy. The report does look at the costs and benefits of increased public access to 

research results through the lens of "openness" with a particular interest in how greater 

public access (and greater openness) affects progress in science, the productivity of the 

research enterprise, the process of innovation, the commercialization of research, and 

ultimately economic growth. 

THE SHARED AGREEMENT ON THE ISSUE OF INCREASED PUBLIC ACCESS 

It is worth noting that all the parties involved in the debate about the NIH public access 

policy support the concept of greater public access to the results of scientific research. 

Even opponents of the policy who believe that there is not a current problem with public 

access which would justify public policy intervention have argued that they are already 

making changes to increase public access where there might be a problem, for instance 

with regard to patients and others interested in the literature on a particular medical 

condition, or for scientists from less developed countries who could not afford to pay 

current subscription rates. So, increased public access is, by all accounts, of benefit to 

the society absent some compelling cost or other counter argument. 

It is also worth stressing that no one disputes that the NIH public access policy has 

already substantially increased public access to the results of NIH funded research from 

what was previously available from traditional STM publishers. 

THE BENEFITS OF INCREASED PUBLIC INTEREST 

While all parties agree that increased access is of benefit, it is important to understand 

exactly why it is beneficial. The report examined this question and reviewed the most 

current literature to see what could be learned. The report found specific benefits in four 

major areas: 

Increased public access accelerates progress in science by speeding up and 

broadening diffusion of knowledge. This was of some benefit to researchers in the field 

covered by a journal allowing them to get to the frontiers of knowledge more quickly. 

But these researchers in a field were more likely to have access through subscriptions as 

they constitute the target audience for the journal. But increased access benefited others 

who do not have equally good access to recent research results such as researchers in the 

field at less well resourced institutions, researchers in other fields, clinicians and patients, 

and those in the general public who are able to contribute to scientific and technological 

development. The report noted, in particular, the benefit of access to those in the private 

sector developing new goods and services who rely on access to scientific research and 

who report considerable difficulties obtaining access. (The report provides ample 

evidence of the lower levels of access experienced by such groups and the problems that 

they encounter without access such as provided by the NIH public access policy.) 

Providing better access to this expanded group of readers has important 

benefits. As Fiona Murray of MIT and her colleagues have pointed out, expanding 

access increases the number of, and the diversity of, potential follow-on researchers. 

4 
41 

This leads to the exploration of a larger number and a wider variety of research paths and 

experiments to find solutions, increasing the likelihood of success. Increased public 

access which leads to more and more varied follow-on research also leads to faster 

movement from basic research to applied research. 

Heidi Williams, also of MIT has shown, in her study of the competition between Celera 

Corporation and the Human Genome Project to decode the human genome, that 

providing increased public access to research results--as practiced by the HGP--not only 

resulted in more follow on research but in faster commercialization of the research 

through new products and services. (The 30% gains in follow-on research and 

commercialization attributed to thc openness of the HGP process persists even today.) 

More follow-on research and faster commercialization increases economic growth and 

creates new jobs. 

The report includes substantial research demonstrating the positive economic benefits of 

increased public access under very conservative assumptions. 

Research results which are made more publicly available generate more 

follow on research and more citations in future articles. This is an important benefit 

to the authors of the manuscripts that are made available. The processes for academic 

advancement--e.g. tenure and promotion decisions--recognize citations in follow- on 

research as indicators of the quality of the research. (The report did recommend that 

these same processes need to be reexamined in order to reward researchers who increase 

public access to their work by early disclosure of their findings or by sharing new tools 

and processes. It further recommended that federal agencies recognize such contributions 

to the progress of science in making grant decisions and in selecting grant panels, etc.). 

Increasing access to research results also increases the efficiency of the 

research enterprise. It helps researchers to locate past research and avoid duplicative or 

dead end lines of inquiry. It also facilitates the continuing evaluation of research, helps 

promote accountability for funders, and better administration of the research enterprise 

allowing a sharper focus on research priorities. 

In all of these ways increasing public access promotes the maximum return on the 

taxpayer's investment in research. Moreover, taxpayers are not asked to pay twice for the 

same research, first through govcrnment grants and then again to obtain access to the 

results through subscriptions. 

IF ALL THE PARTIES AGREE THAT INCREASING PUBLIC ACCESS IS 

BENEFICIAL, AND IF THE REPORT AND RECENT RESEARCH DEMONSTRATE 

THE SIGNIFICANT VALUE RESULTING FROM INCREASED PUBLIC ACCESS, 

ARE THERE DEMONSTRABLE NEGATIVE EFFECTS WHICH OUTWEIGH THIS 

VALUE? 

In doing the research that led to the report we reviewed all the public filings and 

testimony provided by those who opposed the NIH public access policy and who claimed 

5 
42 

that it had or was likely to cause substantial damage. We were unable to find persuasive 

evidence of such damage even though the policy has now been in effect for nearly 4 years, 

having gone into effect on April 7,2008. 

We found no persuasive evidence that greater public access as provided by 

the NIH policy has substantiaUy harmed the subscription supported STM 

publishers over the last four years or threatens the sustainability of such journals. 

While there have been subscription cancellations in the last 4 years, these have linked in 

surveys done on behalf of publishers with the impact of the recession that began in 2008. 

Academic institutions were hit hard by this recession and library budgets were reduced 

year after year. (Increased public access was cited by fewer than 5% of respondents as a 

contributing factor in cancellation decisions in one publisher survey of cancellations cited 

in the report.) 

We found no persuasive evidence that increased public access substantially 

threatened the ability of STM publishers to fund peer review. In considering the 

impact of increased public access on peer review it should be noted that authors provide 

their manuscripts to publishers without being compensated by the publisher (other than 

through the fact of publication itself). Peer reviews are conducted on a voluntary basis by 

scholars as part oftheir obligations as scholars as is much of the editorial effort for STM 

journals. 

We found no persuasive evidence of a significant reduction in traditional 

publishing outlets; in fact we found no evidence of any high impact proprietary 

journal ceasing publication for financial reasons. There are more STM journals being 

published today than there were when the NIH policy went into effect. Over 7500 Open 

Access journals have started over the last decade. There is no evidence of any shortage 

of outlets for the distribution of high quality research. 

The best evidence of the financial status of the STM journals and of any impact 

from increased public access remains in the hands of the publishers. We searched public 

filings and testimony but we also turned to another source with strong incentives to 

correctly portray the financial conditions of traditional publishers--the financial analysts 

that cover the STM industry segment and who make recommendations to investors. The 

STM segment has been a traditional favorite of investors given their relatively high profit 

margins and their ability to continually raise prices faster than inflation. Financial 

analysts notcd that the growth of profits for the STM publishers dropped from 6-7% in 

the first part of the last decade to roughly 4% during the recession. The general 

consensus over the last several years is for profit growth to increase to 5-6% as the 

economy recovers. Some financial analysts also reported that the STM publishers 

downplayed any financial threat due to policies designed to increase public access. 

The report concluded that the benefits of increased public access were clear 

and demonstrable and that there was no persuasive evidence of costs that would 

outweigh the benefits and provide support for a reversal ofthe policy. The 

6 
43 

costlbenefit analysis provides substantial supports for extending the policies to other 

federal funders of substantial extramural research. 

The benefits of increased access are so great than any delay in availability of 

research results should be minimized to the extent practicable. A maximum six 

month delay, now employed by other government and private research funders has not 

been shown to have any negative impact in the biomedical field. Given the benefits of 

increased public access, those who seek delay or special conditions based on their 

disciplines being different from the biomedical arena should bear the burden of proof that 

the benefits of delay to the development and dissemination of high quality research 

outweigh the postponed benefits of greater public. 

The NIH policy focuses on allowing users ofPMC to access and read manuscripts setting 

out research results of NIH funded research. This policy has had substantial benefit. But 

the manuscript is not the only measure by which to judge increased access nor is reading 

an article the only goal of most researchers; in theory researchers should be able to access 

the manuscript and its subparts--underlying data, protocols, tools utilized for analysis etc. 

The return on investment in government research would, in theory, be increased to the 

extent the manuscript and its subparts are machine readable, subject to text and data 

mining and computable, capable of being displayed, linked and translated into other 

languages, and subject to analysis with tools chosen by the reader. The challenge will be 

to find the appropriate degree of openness including access to the manuscript and its 

subparts and being able to use what is available. 

But going beyond the manuscript raises many new questions. Major issues particularly 

regarding unlimited use and reuse and access to data, remain. Some ofthese can be 

addressed by various stakeholders working together; others might be referred to the 

National Academies. There have been many initiatives in this area which should be 

supported in an effort to reach consensus which will enable the appropriate degree of 

increased openness to be determined. 

Digital depositories and other mechanisms for dissemination of knowledge provide high 

returns on investment and should receive greater funding. 

Government should work with stakeholders on standards for metadata to enable search 

and discovery, and standards to ensure interoperability and rules for access among 

repositories to guarantee access. 

Government should also minimize differences among public access rules for federal 

agencies to promote access and decrease the cost of compliance for both public and 

private sector entities, particularly those entities that receive funding from multiple 

federal agencies. 

CONCLUSION 

7 
44 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Mr. Maxwell. 

Dr. Taylor, you are recognized for five minutes. And please if you 

could keep it within five minutes. Your whole written testimony 

will be part of the record. Thank you. 

STATEMENT OF DR. CRISPIN TAYLOR, 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF PLANT BIOLOGISTS 

Dr. TAYLOR. Thank you very much, Chairman Broun, Ranking 

Member Tonko, and members of the subcommittee. I am very 

grateful for the opportunity to come testify today. My name is 

Crispin Taylor and my title is Executive Director of the American 

Society of Plant Biologists, a 5,000-member professional society 

that is based just up the road in Rockville, Maryland. I am also a 

former Chair of the North American chapter of an organization 

called the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, which goes by the acronym ALPSP. ALPSP is a global 

trade association whose membership primarily comprises university presses and professional society publishers. Most of ALPSP’s 

organizational members, including the one I direct, publish one or 

at most a handful of journals. These journals tend to be among the 

most highly regarded in their respective disciplines. 

It is these two top-ranked journals called ‘‘Plant Physiology’’ and 

‘‘The Plant Cell,’’ are integrally involved in developing, validating, 

communicating, disseminating, and ultimately advancing fundamental knowledge about plant biology. This is what the journals 

and indeed the society are all about. To publish these two journals, 

the society expends millions of dollars annually on peer review, editorial management, production, printing, shipping, and hosting the 

online version of the journals on a fully digital, highly reliable platform. 

In your invitation, you asked me about the degree to which each 

of these journals are dependent upon subscriptions. More than half 

of the Society’s $6 million in annual operating revenues derives 

from subscription payments from some 2,000 institutions worldwide. Despite our strenuous efforts and the fact that we price our 

two-journal package extremely competitively, we are already finding it increasingly challenging to maintain this customer base. 

Your invitation also asked me how scholarly societies might be 

affected by public access policies promulgated by the government. 

Well, frankly, that depends on the policies. For example, the policy 

that mandates a one-size-fits-all embargo period, especially one as 

short as 6 months, is in my opinion likely to have profoundly negative impacts, especially for smaller professional societies like ASPB. 

This is not only an assertion. We know from the usage data for 

‘‘Plant Physiology’’ that more than half of the article downloads and 

thus arguably half of the value of the journal to the subscriber take 

place after the first 6 months. Moreover, librarians have told us in 

informal conversations that they would be inclined to cancel their 

subscriptions and wait for release of content at 6 months if that is 

what it came to. 

And that is just ASPB. ALPSP’s members publish journals across 

a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including math, the social 

sciences, and humanities. For journals in these and other areas of 
45 

scholarship, half-lives for article downloads are typically longer 

than one year, and so I would expect the impacts of even a 12- 

month mandated embargo to be even more detrimental in those 

fields. 

Although my concerns regarding the adverse impact of mandated 

embargos are serious, I expect it may take a while for this scenario 

to play out in the form of failed journals or shuttered Societies. I 

have two more pressing worries regarding mandated embargos. 

First, the subscription revenues shrink. The capacity for smaller 

publishers like ASPB to innovate will be closed off. We will be unable to further improve the utility and impact of our journals, and 

we will not have time to launch and monetize new products and 

services like the mobile app on my cell phone through which I can 

access content for ‘‘Plant Phys’’ and ‘‘Plant Cell.’’ Both new services 

will allow us to diversify our revenue streams and move away from 

the current business model. 

Second, if those mandates come with an obligation to deposit articles in a centrally operated government repository such as the 

PubMed Central one we have heard about, then for many journals, 

downloads from those repositories will cut into usage by our own 

journal websites, further lowering the value of our journals to the 

subscribers. 

So much for policies and regulations that would be harmful. As 

my testimony indicates, I do think that governments have a legitimate interest in scholarly communication, but I think that interest 

would be most effectively expressed by encouraging continued innovation rather than stifling it. As we have heard, this approach is 

already articulated in Section 103 of the COMPETES Act, which 

envisions collaborative and cooperative engagement of all stakeholders. 

Among other things, helpful policies will encourage the continued 

development and adoption of industry-wide standards, building off 

the early implementation by almost the entire scholarly communication ecosystem is something called the Digital Object Identifier, 

or DOI, as a form of Social Security number if you like for journal 

articles and other pieces of information online. Such standards 

allow for evermore robust and useful interoperability of otherwise 

disparate information. 

To avoid the distribution of incomplete or imperfect versions of 

articles, policies and practices should also aim toward providing access to the definitive version of an article, the so-called version of 

record. It is this version typically available on a publisher website 

that is actively stewarded and preserved for posterity and to which 

any corrections or amendments are immediately linked. 

In concluding, you asked me whether there is common ground to 

be found. Despite the differences of opinion and perspectives you 

have already heard and that we will doubtless explore in greater 

detail in the coming couple of hours, my answer is a resounding 

yes. The process begun by the scholarly publishing roundtable was 

brought together by publishers, librarians, and university leaders 

is already playing out via the America COMPETES Act and the establishment of collaborative public-private projects and partnerships demonstrating that we will make much more progress together as a community of stakeholders than we would in isolation. 
46 

Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Taylor follows:] 
47 

American Society 

of Plant Biologists 

Cultivating a hettl'rjlltlll"P through plant biology r{JAf'arch 

Official Written Testimony on Federally Funded Research: 

Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests 

Submitted to the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee 

Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Washington, D.C. 

Submitted by 

Crispin Taylor, Executive Director, American Society of Plant Biologists 

On behalf of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (AlPSP) and the 

American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), I submit this testimony for the official record to the 

House Science Space and Technology Committee, Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. I 

would like to thank Chairman Broun, Ranking Member Tonko and Subcommittee members very 

much for their consideration of this testimony regarding access to scholarly information. I have 

taken the liberty of attaching as appendices detailed comments on very similar topics that were 

submitted recently by ASPB and ALPSP to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in response 

to a request for information from that office. 

The key points of my testimony are that the government should adopt sensible, flexible, and 

cautious approaches to drafting and revising public access policies or regulations. These 

approaches should engage all concerned parties, including federal agencies, scientists, university 

administrators, librarians, publishers, and the public, and they should foster innovation and 

collaboration. Policies should focus attention on providing access to the definitive version of an 

article, developing robust metadata standards, and on ensuring increased interoperability among 

journal articles and other valuable sources of information online. And they should recognize and 

embrace the global nature of scientific research and scholarly publishing. Although this testimony 

is not intended to address a particular piece of proposed legislation, it is important to point out 

that these attributes are largely spelled out in existing legislation specifically in Section 103 of the 

America COMPETES Act of 201 0 (Public Law No: 111-358'

) - which itself incorporates many of the 

recommendations in the report of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable'. 
48 

Introduction - About ASPB, ALPSP, and Dr. Taylor 

The scientific literature has been a part of my education and professional life since I was an 

undergraduate reading papers in my university library in the United Kingdom. As a graduate 

student in Michigan and as a postdoc in North Carolina, my appreciation for the literature and the 

role of publishers in filtering and disseminating it became rather more personal, as I began to see 

my own work getting published and I started attending scientific meetings at which the latest 

findings were presented and discussed. Even then, it was abundantly clear to me that scholarly 

publishers - and particularly society and university-based publishers are integral components of 

the communities they serve and support. In many instances, including ASPB's, they were brought 

into existence by those communities, and in most cases, they continue to publish the most 

impactful research in their fields. This is something I have come to know well, because as ASPB's 

CEO I have become closely involved in a number of activities that have direct bearing on the 

Society's continued good health - and on the topic of this hearing. First, as chair of the North 

American chapter of ALPSP (and, as such, a member of that organization's governing council); and 

second, as an invited member of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, which was convened by the 

forerunner to this committee during the previous Congress. More fundamentally, as CEO, it is also 

my responsibility to work with my colleagues and Society's elected and appointed governance 

leaders to ensure that ASPB's long and strong track record as a publisher and a supporter of plant 

science and plant scientists has as illustrious a future as it does a past. 

ASPB is a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit membership corporation created in 1926 and headquartered in 

Rockville, MD. Today, ASPS is an organization of approximately 5,000 professional plant biology 

researchers and educators with members in all 50 states and throughout the world. A strong voice 

for the global plant science community, the Society's mission-achieved through work in the 

realms of research, education, and public policy-is to promote the growth and development of 

plant biology, to encourage and communicate research in plant biology, and to promote the 

interests and growth of plant scientists in general. 

As a large part of its mission to communicate plant science research, the Society self-publishes two 

of the most widely cited plant science research journals: The Plant Cell' and Plant Phvsiology4. Since 

2002, ASPS has also published The Arabidopsis BookS (TAB), an innovative, free access, peer· 

reviewed publication that represents a new model for communicating up-to-date and 

comprehensive information about a broad range of topics in research on the model plant 

Arabidopsis thaliana and related species. New articles are published as novel research fields emerge, 

and older content is substantively revised on an ongoing basis so that it can be kept up to date. 

Teaching Tools in Plant Biology6 (TIPB), which is aimed at improving teaching and learning in plant 

biology, is another innovative product in which ASPB is currently investing. TIPB, an editorial 

innovation of The Plant Cell, combines up-to-date peer-reviewed research with flexible presentation 

components that can be used alone or integrated into teachers' lesson plans so that they can 

confidently present exciting plant biology topics in their classrooms. Each Teaching Tool 

incorporates a short essay introducing each topic, PowerPoint slides, suggested readings, and tips 

for engaging students in the material. 
49 

ASPB is a member of ALPSP, the international trade association representing scholarly and 

professional publishers across all academic disciplines. ALPSP has a broad and diverse membership 

of over 300 organizations in 37 countries who publish over half the world's total active journals, as 

well as books, databases and other products. ALPSP's mission is to connect, train and inform the 

scholarly and professional publishing community and to play an active part in shaping the future of 

academic and scholarly communication. In total, the scholarly publishing industry employs around 

50,000 people and contributes roughly US$3.5 billion to the US balance of trade. In the US, ALPSP 

represents 60 organizations in 14 states employing an estimated 3,000 individuals. 

Of Business Models, Mandates, Access, and Embargos 

Scholarly publishing is an international enterprise, with around 1.5 million articles published 

annually'. US researchers dominate this output with a 29% share of the total. The majority of 

publishers (95%) are small, publishing one or two journals. At the other end of the scale, the 100 

largest publishers account for 67% of the total number of journals. Collectively, scholarly publishers 

adopt a variety of business models to support publication of their journals, reflecting the diverse 

market in which they operate. No existing digital business model has demonstrated its viability to 

the satisfaction of all, and ASPB cautions against de facto government endorsement of any single 

approach. 

ASPB and many of ALPSP's other members who publish just one or a handful of journals are, in 

effect, small businesses, and we behave as such. As components of a global information, research 

and development infrastructure, publishers and professional societies contribute richly and 

meaningfully in furthering the nation's competitiveness, and we believe that the work we do 

supports scholarship, innovation, and economic growth. We endeavor to foster a culture of 

innovation and, as do small businesses everywhere, to be prepared to overcome the challenges -

and embrace the opportunities inherent in operating in rapidly evolving business environment. 

As a scholarly publisher, ASPB plays a central role in the process by which plant biology research is 

developed, validated, communicated, disseminated, and ultimately accepted by the global scientific 

community. To publish its two top-ranked journals, ASPB expends millions of dollars annually on 

peer review, editorial management, production, printing, shipping, distributing, and hosting its 

online journals on a fully digital, highly reliable platform. 

Whether an article is read online or in print. high-quality peer review, page composition (XML), 

copyediting, and the listing and linking of bibliographic and reference data must be managed, 

necessitating considerable human capital investment in staff, in addition to scores of editors around 

the world. Our editors maintain the quality and reputation of our journals, utilizing the wellestablished system of peer review, whereby independent experts review submitted articles. 

Accepted articles are those that pass muster based on established criteria, including novelty and 

significance of the research findings. Managing peer review for ASPB's journals is a complex 

undertaking. It requires sophisticated electronic resources, associated support personnel, and help 

from thousands of referees. Each year ASPS makes such necessary investments to fulfill its public 

nonprofit mission, generating both an intellectual and a financial return through the dissemination 

of scientific research. 

But as our mission statements indicate, our motivation is not profit; it's the continued vitality of the 

disciplines we represent. So ASPB funnels any surpluses generated from our publishing activities 

r b.ttp:lIlNWw.stm-aSSQc.org!industry-stat~he-stm~Q.Qf!L 
50 

into other aspects of our mission - scientific meetings, professional development, public 

engagement, and broadening participation in our professions. We also frequently chose to make 

the content we publish freely available, whether through discrete products like TAB (mentioned 

above), in developing countries, or on an article-by-article basis within the journals through an 

additional author payment. 

Indeed, ASPS has chosen to make the full content of both of its journals freely available 12 months 

after publication, both via the journals' web sites and via the NIH's repository, PubMed Central 8 . 

ASPB has been depositing content at PubMed Central for over a decade, motivated both by an 

interest in ensuring that high quality plant science research was available to biomedical researchers, 

and as a component of the Society's long term preservation and archiving strategy. Along with 150 

other publishers, ASPB also participates in a suite of services collectively known as Research4Life9 

that makes the literature we publish freely available to researchers in dozens of developing 

countries. And the full text of both journals, as well as each TTPB, is available upon publication to 

all members of the Society. 

As a result of these and similar publisher-driven initiatives across the industry - and strenuous 

efforts to develop the global subscription market - accessing scholarly information is not a problem 

for scholars. Indeed, a recent survey from the Publishing Research Consortium found that 97% of 

researchers in North America have very or fairly easy access to research journals '0. 

For ASPB and the majority of other scholarly publishers, however, embargos are necessary to 

preserve the initial value of the content we publish and to generate the income we use to 

continue to support our mission, including publishing. And although ASPB has determined that a 

12-month embargo strikes an appropriate balance between its objective to disseminate content as 

broadly as possible and its need to make ends meet, for other journals in other disciplines, different 

embargo periods are required. Thus, Federal agencies should not impose embargo periods on nonfederally funded businesses. Individual publisher business models are not arbitrary, but are carefully 

calibrated to meet the needs of the particular markets in which they operate. 

In ASPB's case, the journals generate approximately 80% of the Society's $6 million in annual 

revenue. A little more than half of the total income derives from 2,000 institutional subscriptions, 

which we work very hard to sell to universities and corporations around the world, and another 

20% from charges levied on hundreds of authors. By contrast, ASPB devotes about half of its 

operating budget to supporting the journals publishing operation, with the remainder devoted to 

advancing the broader scholarly missions of the society missions that, because we are part of the 

same community, hew to the larger goals of the academic research and education endeavor. 

Even so, ASPB is working toward shifting this balance by exploring the development of new 

revenue-generating products and services that meet the needs of our audience and broaden our 

markets while simultaneously addressing the Society's mission and embracing the opportunities 

inherent in a shift from print-based to digitally empowered forms of communication. ASPB also 

continues to experiment with and explore novel approaches toward expanding access to its 

journals' content, including very-low-cost article rental models and, with Plant Physiology, via a 

membership-based free access option. 

1]lll;==Jlill=LU\W=~==OlliJl!ill Access vs. Importance 
51 

However, it will take some time to establish new revenue streams, and in the meantime we need 

the flexibility afforded by the 12 month embargo period we ourselves established for the journals 

over a decade ago to create the space and time in which to innovate. We know from informal 

conversations with university librarians and from our own assessment of data on the use of our 

journals online that federal imposition of a 6-month embargo would lead to cancellation of 

subscriptions and a further tightening of our bottom line. Put simply, shortened embargo periods 

would undermine the society's capacity to invest for the future. 

ALPSP, too, is not in favor of mandated deposit to centralized open repositories. In addition to 

significant concerns about long-term sustainability and piracy, open repositories have deleterious 

effects on the publishing model; for example, NIH does not currently provide publishers with full, 

detailed usage statistics from PubMed Central, which means publishers are unable to supply 

libraries with the complete picture with regard to their institution's use of a wide range of journals. 

Such usage data are crucial in determining renewals and whilst this situation persists, subscriptions 

are being cancelled based on incomplete usage data. Furthermore, data from the National Institute 

of Health reports that more than half of all PubMed Central users are from outside the US. This 

repository is therefore reducing the export market for the US publishing industry. 

A Sensible Approach 

ASPB strongly supports approaches toward further improving public access - and toward 

enhancing the utility and value of scholarly information in general- that are inclusive, flexible, 

forward-looking, and factually based. One-size-fits-all mandates, and, indeed, mandates of any 

kind, are antithetic to such an approach. 

ASPB believes that it would be in the best interest of the United States government and all other 

stakeholders to strike a balance between public access and the needs and interests of the scholarly 

publishing industry because of the positive impact and value the latter brings to the progress of 

science and its contributions to American society and the national economy. Such a balance can be 

achieved based on shared principles. including the importance of peer review, the recognition of 

economic realities, the exploration and adoption of adaptable and viable publishing business 

models, the need to ensure secure long-term archiving and preservation of scholarly information, 

the increasing need to establish connections among disparate information sources and repositories 

online, and the desirability of broad access. One way to achieve this balance is for government to 

adopt a sensible, flexible, and cautious approach to drafting and revising public access policies-an 

approach that engages all concerned parties, including federal agencies, scientists, university 

administrators, librarians, publishers, and the public. 

Indeed, it is ASPB's position that government agencies should develop flexible public access policies 

through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders, including researchers and 

publishers. Policies should be guided by the urgent need to foster interoperability of information 

across multiple databases and platforms. Agencies' efforts and resources could then be directed 

toward facilitating cyberinfrastructure and collaborative programs with and among agencies and 

other stakeholders to develop robust standards for the structure of full text and metadata, 

navigation tools, and other applications to achieve interoperability across the scholarly literature 

and other information sources. 

ASPB and ALPSP are aware that since passage of the America COMPETES reauthorization a number 

of collaborative projects involving publishers and federal agencies - particularly the National Science 
52 

Foundation and the Department of Energy - have emerged. Both organizations strongly support 

such efforts, which include efforts to more accurately tie published research articles to particular 

funding opportunities (i.e., grants) and linking between research reports submitted by grantees and 

subsequent journal publications. These efforts fall on a continuum of vital public-private 

partnerships that have blossomed in the scholarly publishing arena since journals first started going 

online in the early 1990s. 

Most notable among these is Cross Ref ", which was established by publishers initially to develop 

mechanisms for linking between the citations sections of journal articles - an important and 

impactful publisher-led, standards-based innovation that has become a fixture of the scholarly 

communication enterprise. More recent efforts - by CrossRef and others focus on author name 

disambiguation, establishing standards-based unique ids for datasets and other information, and 

linking database entries to journal articles describing them. 

Developing Standards to Foster Interoperability 

A defining feature of the Internet is that information is dispersed and widely distributed. It is, 

nevertheless, readily discoverable. So, the use of a centralized, government-controlled platform for 

a large corpus of scholarly content has many significant downsides, not the least of which is 

increased and unnecessary costs to the government and an unnecessary diversion of funds that 

would be better used to directly support research and discovery. A centralized approach 

discourages innovation by driving traffic away from innovators, including publishers, thus 

minimizing scientific and commercial opportunities. 

Indeed, publishers have gone to considerable lengths in developing tools to ensure interoperability 

between different access systems. For example the Digital Object Identifier (00112) system, to 

provide persistent identification of digital objects, CrossRef and its various ongoing projects aimed 

at connecting users with primary research content and the Open Research and Contributor 10 

(ORCID 13) initiative, to solve author name ambiguity in scholarly communications and latterly 

resolving institutional naming ambiguity. 

Publishers are continuing to invest in metadata standards, which improve the ease with which 

relevant articles can be discovered. With such excellent standards, search tools are all that is 

required to connect users with the most appropriate content for their needs, and importantly to the 

VoR. Such metadata standards include those developed by EDltEUR14 , IDEAlliance (PRISM)" and 

NISO'6 . In addition, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative17 provides key specifications and best 

practice regarding the use of metadata for the description of various digital resources (including 

books and journal articles). It enables interoperability of different applications and vocabularies and 

optimizes the metadata for searching. DataCite'8, which extends the CrossRef-promoted Digital 

Object Identifier (DOl) to datasets, is also noteworthy. 

t1httpJ/www,(fossreforg 

12 http://www.do!org 

13 http://orcid.org 

14 http://www editeur.orgl 

15 http://www.idealliance,ora/soecifications/prism/ 

16 htto: IIwww.niso.ora/standarcts/ 

17 http://dubllncore.orgf 

18 DataCite CblJ1?.ildatacite.org) is a not-for-profit organization established to facilitate easier access to research data on the Internet, 

increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citab!e contributions to the scholarly record, and support data archiving that will 

permit results to be verified and fe-purposed for future study. 
53 

Within the plant biology domain, ASPB is seeking to collaborate with operators of a prominent 

knowledge base in plant biology that incorporates a rich array of genomic information from a wide 

variety of plant species to establish mechanisms for algorithmically connecting journal articles to 

database entries upon publication. Specifically, the collaborators propose to enable the retrieval of 

functional gene annotations and molecular annotations from ASPB journal articles using datamining tools such as Textpresso'9 and BioCreative20 , both of which make use of Natural Language 

Processing and are organized around robust and highly structured ontologies standardized 

dictionaries of terms. The collaborators plan to create a reference library that includes known and 

predicted gene names, symbols, functions, phenotypes, and pathway annotations in three target 

plant species. Together with the ontologies, which will playa key role in structuring data 

annotation, the library will also help establish data capture architectures that the ASPB journals 

would implement with their authors as manuscripts are being submitted, thereby directly, 

immediately, and algorithmically connecting published journal articles with the underlying datasets 

and knowledgebase. Both collaborators envision developing proof-of-concept data-mining 

methodologies that would be broadly applicable in other fields of research. Such connections will 

markedly improve value and utility of scholarly works. 

Despite this community-led innovation in developing meta data standards, an important role for 

government in this arena is to drive and fund the interoperability standards that would facilitate 

and enable ever richer connections among journal articles and other types of scholarly information 

available online and promote the widespread adoption and use of such standards globally. 

Version of Record 

Studies have demonstrated that researchers prefer to access the publisher-created Version of 

Record (VoR) from a peer-reviewed journal as the authoritative, definitive version, over versions in 

subject or institutional repositories" ,". It is therefore ASPB's contention that approaches toward 

further increasing public access to research articles should have as their primary objective to provide 

access to the VoR. 

Conclusion 

As I stated at the outset, it is my contention that the government should adopt sensible, flexible, 

and cautious approaches to drafting and revising policies or regulations aimed at further improving 

public access. These approaches should engage all concerned parties, including federal agencies, 

scientists, university administrators, librarians, publishers, and the public, and they should foster 

innovation and collaboration. Policies should focus attention on providing access to the VoR, 

developing robust metadata standards, and on ensuring increased interoperability among journal 

articles and other valuable sources of information online. And they should recognize and embrace 

the global nature of scientific research and scholarly publishing. 

This concludes my testimony. Many thanks again for your time and attention. 

Crispin Taylor, PhD 

Executive Director 

American Society of Plant Biologists 
54 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Dr. Taylor. You were just dead-on. 

Those buzzes that you just heard indicates that we have a vote on 

the Floor. If the two of you can be very quick and get through exactly five minutes each, we can get through both of you all and we 

will recess and come back. So I would like to try to do that if you 

all could please hold your comments to five minutes or if you could 

cut it 30 seconds or so short. I don’t want to shortchange anybody, 

Mr. Maxwell, or anybody but Mr. Shieber, you are recognized for 

five minutes. 

STATEMENT OF MR. STUART M. SHIEBER, 

DIRECTOR, OFFICE FOR SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS, 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

Mr. SHIEBER. Okay. Thank you, Chairman Broun, Ranking Member Tonko, members of the committee. My name is Stuart Shieber. 

I am a Computer Science Professor at Harvard University. As a 

faculty member, I led the development of Harvard’s Open Access 

Policies, and since 2008, I have also served as the Faculty Director 

of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication. I want to thank 

you for the opportunity to speak with you today. 

Harvard’s longstanding research policy calls for the idea that we 

as—calls for the ideas that we as faculty and researchers produce 

to receive ‘‘the widest possible dissemination.’’ At one time, this 

was achieved by distributing scholarly articles in the form of printed issues of journals sent to the research libraries of the world for 

reading by their patrons and paid for by subscription fees. But 

internet-era technologies hold the promise of transforming this system, distributing and using knowledge in ways not previously 

imaginable. Ideally, this would lead to a universality of access to 

research results known as open access, truly achieving the widest 

possible dissemination of our research. 

The benefits of open access are many. It eliminates barriers to 

reading scholarly literature and broadens access beyond just those 

who, like myself, are privileged to be within the orbit of a major 

research library. It expands access to those at the full range of 

schools, businesses large and small, and the general public. Open 

access makes practical the novel reuse of the literature through 

computer analysis of the entire corpus of research results. Economists have shown that broader public access to federally funded research would have positive impacts on the U.S. economy totaling 

billions of dollars, covering its cost many times over. But perhaps 

most importantly, open access to research is an intrinsic public 

good. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘‘the most important bill in our 

whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people.’’ 

Unfortunately, this promise is not currently being realized because of systemic problems in scholarly publishing. Libraries have 

observed with alarm a long-term dramatic hyperinflation in subscription costs of journals which have increased at a steady rate of 

about seven percent per year. Other symptoms of dysfunction include huge price disparities among journals of similar quality and 

extraordinary profit margins. Even at Harvard, which holds the 

largest academic library in the world, we have had to curtail serial 

spending through a painful series of journal cancellations. 
55 

In 2008, the faculty of arts and sciences, my own faculty, enacted 

by unanimous vote an open-access policy. Faculty decided to grant 

a license to the university to openly distribute our scholarly articles 

and commit to providing copies of our manuscript articles for distribution through our online repository. This policy allows faculty 

to retain sufficient rights to provide open supplemental access to 

our scholarly articles. Since then, similar policies have been voted 

by faculty bodies across Harvard, as well as institutions as diverse 

as MIT, University of Kansas, Stanford, Princeton, Bucknell, Columbia, Oberlin, Duke, and many others. Because of the Harvard 

policies, we now provide online access to over 7,000 articles, representing 4,000 Harvard-affiliated authors. These articles have 

been downloaded almost three-quarters of a million times to people 

on every continent in the world, including, surprisingly, Antarctica. 

This approach to the access problem is also seen in the extraordinarily successful public access policy of the National Institutes of 

Health. Today, NIH provides free online access to 2.4 million articles downloaded a million times per day by half a million individual users. These users come from universities, research labs, 

companies, and the general public showing the broad scope of the 

latent demand for these materials. The NIH model could be replicated at other funded agencies as envisioned in the recently reintroduced bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act. 

The standard objection to this kind of policy is that supplemental 

open access could harm the publishing industry, but as Mr. Maxwell’s report for the CED concluded, after four years of the NIH 

policy and institutional policies like Harvard’s, ‘‘there is no persuasive evidence that increased access threatens the sustainability of 

traditional subscription-supported journals or their ability to fund 

rigorous peer review.’’ 

In addition, the author gains value from publication of an article 

in a journal. Vetting, copyediting, typesetting, and most importantly, imprimatur of the journal, value that authors and their institutions and funders should be, would be, and are willing to pay 

for. Thus, in a hypothetical world of harm to subscriptions, journals 

can switch to a different revenue model charging a one-time publication fee to cover the costs of publishing the article. I state this 

as though the publication fee revenue model is itself hypothetical, 

but it is not. Peer-reviewed open-access journals already exist in 

the thousands, many using the publication fee revenue model, 

which by now is a proven mechanism used by commercial and nonprofit publishers alike, including even the most established journal 

publishers. 

I opened my statement by quoting a mission of academics such 

as myself to provide the widest possible dissemination—open access—to the ideas and knowledge resulting from our research. Government, too, has an interest in the widest possible dissemination 

of government-funded research—to maximize the return on the taxpayers’ enormous investment in that research, to bring economic 

benefits that far exceed the costs, to provide transparency, to inform the public. Providing open access to the publicly funded research literature, fulfilling Jefferson’s call for diffusion of knowledge, will benefit researchers, taxpayers, and every person who 
56 

gains from new technologies, new medicines, new jobs, and new solutions to longstanding problems of every kind. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Shieber follows:] 
57 

Statement of Stuart M. Shieher hefore the 

Committee on Science, Space and Technology 

Suhcommittee on Investigations and Oversight 

U.S. House of Representatives 

March 29, 2012 

Chairman Broun and Members of the Subcommittee: 

My name is Stuart Shieber. I am the James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of 

Computer Science at Harvard University. My primary field of research is computationallinguistics, the study of human language from a computer science perspective, often with application to 

the engineering of useful computer systems that manipulate language. As a faculty member, I led 

the development and enactment of Harvard's open-access policies. Since October of 2008, I have 

served in the additional role as the faculty director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about some of the actions that we 

have taken at Harvard to provide the broadest possible access to the results of our research. 

THE POTENTIAL FOR OPEN ACCESS 

The mission of the university is to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge to the benefit of 

all. In Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), where I hold my faculty post, we codify this 

in the FAS Grey Book, which states that research policy "should encourage the notion that ideas or 

creative works produced at the University should be used for the greatest possible public benefit. 

This would normally mean the widest possiblc dissemination and use of such ideas or materials." 

At one time, the widest possible dissemination was achieved by distributing the scholarly articles 

describing the fruits of research in the form of printed issues of peer-reviewed journals, sent to the 

research libraries of the world for reading by their patrons, and paid for by subscription fees. These 

fees covered the various services provided to the authors of the articles - management of the peer 

review process, copy-editing, typesetting, and other production processes - as well as the printing, 

binding, and shipping of the physical objects. 

Thanks to the forward thinking of federal science funding agencies, including NSF, DARPA, 

NASA, and DOE, we now have available computing and networking technologies that hold the 

promise of transforming the mechanisms for disseminating and using know ledge in ways not imaginable even a few decades ago. The internet allows nearly instantaneous distribution of content for 

essentially zero marginal cost to a large and rapidly increasing proportion of humanity. Ideally, 

this would ramify in a universality of access to research results, thereby truly achieving the widest 

possible dissemination. 
58 

The benefits of such so-called open access are manifold. The signatories of the 2002 Budapest 

Open Access Initiative state that 

The public good [open access] makers] possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted 

access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. 

Removing access batriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make 

this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in 

a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. 

From a more pragmatic point of view, a large body of research has shown that public research 

has a large positive impact on economic growth, and that access to the scholarly literature is central 

to that impact. Martin and Tang's recent review of the literature concludes that "there have been 

numerous attempts to measure the economic impact of publicly funded research and development 

(R&D), all of which show a large positive contribution to economic growth.'" It is therefore not 

surprising that Houghton's modeling of the effect of broader public access to federally funded 

research shows that the benefits to the US economy come to the billions of dollars and are eight 

times the costs.' 

Opening access to the literature makes it available not only to human readers, but to computer 

processing as well. There are some million and a half scholarly articles published each year. 3 

No human can read them all or even the tiny fraction in a particular subfield, but computers can, 

and computer analysis of the text, known as text mining, has the potential not only to extract 

high-quality structured data from article databases but even to generate new research hypotheses. 

My own field of research, computational linguistics, includes text mining. I have collaborated 

with colleagues in the East Asian Languages and Civilization department on text mining of tens 

of thousands of classical Chinese biographies and with colleagues in the History department on 

computational analysis of pre-modern Latin texts. Performing similar analyses on the current 

research literature, however, is encumbered by proscriptions of copyright and contract because the 

dominant publishing mechanisms are not open. 

'Ben R. Martin and Puay Tang, Thc benefits from publicly funded research, SEWPS Paper No. 161, SPRUScience and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton (2007). http://www.sussex.ac . ukl 

spru/documents/sewp161 

2John Houghton, Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs 

(July 2010). http://'''''' .arlo org/sparc/bm-doc/vufrpaa 

3Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, Report and Recommendations from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable (January 

2010). http://'''''' . aau. edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset. aspx?id~10044 
59 

In Harvard's response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy's request for infonnation 

on public access! Provost Alan Garber highlighted the economic potential for the kinds of reuse 

enabled by open access. 

Public access not only facilitates innovation in research-driven industries such as 

medicine and manufacturing. It stimulates the growth of a new industry adding 

value to the newly accessible research itself. This new industry includes search, 

current awareness, impact measurement, data integration, citation linking, text and 

data mining, translation, indexing, organizing, recommending, and summarizing. 

These new services not only create new jobs and pay taxes, but they make the 

underlying research itself more useful. Research funding agencies needn't take on 

the job of provide all these services themselves. As long as they ensure that the 

funded research is digital, online, free of charge. and free for reuse, they can rely on 

an after-market of motivated developers and entrepreneurs to bring it to users in the 

fonns in which it will be most useful. Indeed, scholarly publishers are themselves in 

a good position to provide many of these value-added services, which could provide 

an additional revenue source for the industry. 

Finally, free and open access to the scholarly literature is an intrinsic good. It is in the interest 

of the researchers generating the research and those who might build upon it, the public who take 

interest in the research, the press who help interpret the results, and the government who funds 

these efforts. All things being equal, open access to the research literature ought to be the standard. 

SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS IN THE JOURNAL PUBLISHING SYSTEM 

Unfortunately, over the last several years, it has become increasingly clear to many that this 

goal of the "widest possible dissemination" was in jeopardy because of systemic problems in the 

current mechanisms of scholarly communication, which are not able to take full advantage of the 

new technologies to maximize the access to research and therefore its potential for social good. 

By way of background, I should review the standard process for disseminating research results. 

Scholars and researchers - often with government funding - perform research and write up 

their results in the form of articles, which are submitted to journals that are under the editorial 

control of the editor-in-chief and editorial boards made up of other scholars. These editors find 

appropriate reviewers, also scholars, to read and provide detailed reviews of the articles, which 

authors use to improve the quality of the articles. Reviewers also provide advice to the editors 

on whether the articles are appropriate for publication in the journal, the final decisions being 

Garber, Harvard response to the White HOllse RFI on public access to research (January 2012). http://ose. 

hul.harvard. edu/stp-rfi-response-january-2012 
60 

4 

made by the editors. Participants in these aspects of the publishing process are overwhelmingly 

volunteers, scholars who provide their time freely as a necessary part of their engagement in the 

research enterprise. The management of this process, handling the logistics, is typically performed 

by the journal's publisher, who receives the copyright in the article from the author for its services. 

The publisher also handles any further production process such as copy-editing and typesetting of 

accepted articles and their distribution to subscribers through print issue or more commonly these 

days through online access. This access is provided to researchers by their institutional libraries, 

which pay for annual subscriptions to the journals. 

Libraries have observed with alarm a long-term dramatic rise in subscription costs of journals. 

The Association of Research Libraries, whose members represent the leading research libraries 

of the United States and Canada, have tracked serials expenditures for over three decades. From 

1986 through 2010 (the most recent year with available data), expenditures in ARL libraries have 

increased by a factor of almost 5. Even discounting for inflation, the increase is almost 2.5 times. 

These increases correspond to an annualized rate of almost 7% per year, during a period in which 

inflation has averaged less than 3%.' 

Another diagnostic of the market dysfunction in the journal publishing system is the huge disparity in subscription costs between different journals. Bergstrom and Bergstrom showed that even 

within a single field of research, commercial journals are on average five times more expensive 

per page than non-profit journals.6 When compared by cost per citation, which controls better 

for journal quality, the disparity becomes even greater, a factor of 10 times. Odylzko notes that 

"The great disparity in costs among journals is a sign of an industry that has not had to worry 

about efficiency.,,7 Finally, the extraordinary profit margins, increasing even over the last few years 

while research libraries' budgets were under tremendous pressure, provide yet another signal of 

the absence of a functioning competitive market. 

The Harvard library system is the largest academic library in the world, and the fifth largest 

library of any sort. In attempting to provide access to research results to our faculty and students, 

the university subscribes to tens of thousands of serials at a cost of about 9 million dollars per 

year. Nonetheless, we too have been buffeted by the tremendous growth in journal costs over 

the last decades, with Harvard's serials expenditures growing by a factor of 3 between 1986 and 

5 Association of Research Libraries, Monograph and Serial Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986·2010 (20]()). http://Y,,,, . 

arlo org/bm-doc/t2.monser10. xls 

6Carl T. Bergstrom and Theodore C. Bergstrom, The costs and benefits of library site licenses to academic journals. 

PlVceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. volume 101, number 3 (20 January 2004). http://dx . doi. org/ 

10 .1073/pnas. 0305628101 

7 Andrew Odlyzko, The Economics of Electronic Journals, First Monday, volume 2, number 8 (4 August 1997). http: 

/ /firstmonday. org/htbin/ cgiYrap/bin/ oj s/index. php/fm/article/view/542/463 
61 

2004.8 Such geometric increases in expenditures could not be sustained indefinitely. Over the years 

since 2004 our journal expenditure increases have been curtailed through an aggressive effort at 

deduplication, elimination of print subscriptions, and a painful series of journal cancellations. As 

a researcher, I know that Harvard does not subscribe to all of the journals that I would like access 

to for my own research, and if Harvard, with its scale, cannot provide optimal subscription access, 

other universities without our resources are in an even more restricted position. 

Correspondingly, the articles that we ourselves generate as authors arc not able to be accessed 

as broadly as we would like. We write articles not for direct financial gain - we are not paid for 

the articles and receive no royalties - but rather so that others can read them and make use of the 

discoveries they describe. To the extent that access is limited, those goals are thwarted. 

The economic causes of these observed phenomena are quite understandable. Journal access is 

a monopolistic good. Libraries can buy access to a journal's articles only from the publisher of that 

journal, by virtue of the monopoly character of copyright. In addition, the high prices of journals 

are hidden from the "consumers" of the journals, the researchers reading the articles, because an 

intermediary, the library, pays thc subscriptions on their behalf. The market therefore embeds a 

moral hazard. Under such conditions, market failure is not surprising; one would expect inelasticity 

of demand, hyperinflation, and inefficiency in the market, and that is what we observe. Prices 

inflate, leading to some libraries canceling journals, leading to further price increases to recoup 

revenue - a spiral that ends in higher and higher prices paid by fewer and fewer libraries. The 

market is structured to provide institutions a Hobson's choice between unsustainable expenditures 

or reduced access. 

The unfortunate side effect of this market dysfunction has been that as fewer libraries can afford 

the journals, access to the research results they contain is diminished. In 2005, then Provost of 

Harvard Steven Hyman appointed an ad hoc committee, which I chaired, to examine these issues 

and make recommendations as to what measures Harvard might pursue to mitigate this problem 

of access to our writings. Since then, we have been pursuing a variety of approaches to maximize 

access to the writings of Harvard researchers. 

ADDRESSING INSUFFICIENT ACCESS THROUGH AN OPEN-ACCESS POLICY 

One of these approaches involves the self-imposition by faculty of an open-access policy according to which faculty grant a license to the university to distribute our scholarly articles and commit 

to providing copies of our manuscript articles for such distribution. By virtue of this kind of policy, 

the problem of access limitation is mitigated by providing a supplemental venue for access to the 

8 Association of Research Libraries, Monograph and Serial Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986-2010 (2010). http://www . 

arlo org/bm-doc/t2_IDonser10. xIs 
62 

6 

articles. Four years ago, in February of 2008, the members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at 

Harvard became the first school to enact such a policy,9 by unanimous vote as it turned out. 

In order to guarantee the freedom of faculty authors to choose the rights situation for their 

articles, the license is waivable at the sole discretion of the author, so faculty retain control ovcr 

whether the university is granted this license. But the policy has the effect that by default, the 

university holds a license to our articles, which can therefore be distributed from a repository that 

we have set up for that purpose. Since the FAS vote, six other schools at Harvard - Harvard 

Law School, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 

Harvard Business School, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard Graduate School of Design -

have passed this same kind of policy, and similar policies have been voted by faculty bodies at many 

other universities as well, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Princeton, 

Columbia, and Duke. Notably, the policies have seen broad faculty support, with faculty imposing 

these policies on themselves typically by unanimous or near unanimous votes. 

Because of these policies in the seven Harvard schools, Harvard's article repository, called 

DASH (for Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard),JO now provides access to over 7,000 articles 

representing 4,000 Harvard-affiliated authors. Articles in DASH have been downloaded almost 

three-quarters of a million times." The number of waivers of the license has been very small; we 

estimate the waiver rate at about 5%. Because of the policy, as faculty authors we are retaining 

rights to openly distribute the vast m<tiority of the articles that we write. 

The process of consultation in preparation for the faculty vote was a long one. I started speaking with faculty committees, departments, and individuals about two years hefore the actual vote. 

During that time and since, I have not met a single faculty member or researcher who objected to 

the principle underlying the open-access policies at Harvard, to obtain the widest possible dissemination for our scholarly results, and have been struck by the broad support for the kind of open 

dissemination of articles that the policy and the repository allow. 

This approach to the access limitation problem, the provision of supplemental access venues, 

is also seen in the extraordinarily successful public access policy of the National Institutes of 

Health (NIH), which Congress mandated effective April, 2008. By virtue of that policy, researchers 

funded by NIH provide copies of their articles for distribution from NIH's PubMed Central (PMC) 

repository. Today, PMC provides free onlinc access to 2.4 million articles downloaded a million 

times per day by half a million users.'2 NIH's own analysis has shown that a quarter of the users 

of the FAS policy and the other Harvard open-access policies is available at http://ose.hul.harvard.edu/ 

policies. 

'O:http://dash.harvard. edul 

''http://dash . harvard. edu/mydash 

12Nationa1lnstitutes of Health, NIH Public Access Policy Implications (2012). http://publieaeeess .nih.govl 

publie_aeeess_poliey_implications_2012.pdf 
63 

are researchers. The hundreds of thousands of articles they are accessing per day demonstrates the 

large latent demand for articles not being satisfied by the journals' subscription base. Companies 

account for another 17%, showing that the policy benefits small businesses and corporations, who 

need access to scientific advances to spur innovation. Finally, the general public accounts for 

40% of the users, some quarter of a million people per day, demonstrating that these articles are 

of tremendous interest to the taxpayers who fund the research in the first place and who deserve 

access to the results that they have underwritten. 

THE STANDARD OBJECTION TO OPEN-ACCESS POLICIES 

The standard objection to these open-access policies is that supplemental access to scholarly 

articles, such as that provided by institutional repositories like Harvard's DASH or subject-based 

repositories like NIH's PubMed Central, could supplant subscription access to such an extent that 

subscriptions would come under substantial price pressure. Sufficient price pressure, in this scenario, could harm the publishing industry, the viability of journals, and the peer review and journal 

production processes. 

There is no question that the services provided by journals are valuable to the research enterprise, 

so such concerns must be taken seriously. By now, however, these arguments have been aired and 

addressed in great detail. I recommend the report "The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who 

Will Control Access to the Results?" by my co-panelist Elliott Maxwell,13 which provides detailed 

support for the report's conclusion that "There is no persuasive evidence that increased access 

threatens the sustainability of traditional subscription-supported journals, or their ability to fund 

rigorous peer review." The reasons are manifold, including the fact that supplemental access covers 

only a fraction of the articles in any given journal, is often delayed relative to publication, and 

typically provides a manuscript version of the article rather than the version of record. Consistent 

with this reasoning, the empirical evidence shows no such discernible effect. After four years of the 

NIH policy, for instance, subscription prices have continued to increase, as have publisher margins. 

The NIH states that "while the U.S. economy has suffered a downturn during the time period 2007 

to 2011, scientific publishing has grown: The number of journals dedicated to publishing biological 

sciences/agriculture articles and medicinelhealth articles increased 15% and 19%, respectively. 

The average subscription prices of biology journals and health sciences journals increased 26% 

and 23%, respectively. Publishers forecast increases to the rate of growth of the medical journal 

market, from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.3% in 2014."14 

IlCommittee for Economic Development. The Future afTaxpayer-Funded Research: Wha Will Control Access to the 

Results? (2012). http://WW>1. ced.org/component/blog/entry/l/765 

14National Institutes of Health, NIH Public Access Policy Implications (2012). http://publicaccess . nih. gov / 

public_access_policy _implications_2012. pdf 
64 

OPEN-ACCESS JOURNAL PUBLISHING AS AN ALTERNATIVE 

TO SUBSCRIPTION JOURNAL PUBLISHING 

Nonetheless, it does not violate the laws of economics that increased supplemental access (even 

if delayed) to a sufficiently high proportion of articles (even if to a deprecated version) could put 

price pressure on subscription journals, perhaps even so much so that journals would not be able 

to recoup their costs. In this hypothetical case, would that be the end of journals? No, because 

even if publishers (again, merely by hypothesis and counterfactually) add no value for the readers 

(beyond what the readers are already getting in the [again hypothetical] universal open access), 

the author and the author's institution gain much value: vetting, copyediting, typesetting, and most 

importantly, imprimatur of the journal. This is value that authors and their institutions should be, 

would be, and are willing to pay for. The upshot is that journals will merely switch to a different 

business model, in which the journal charges a one-time publication fee to cover the costs of 

publishing the article. 

I state this as though this publication-fee revenue model is itself hypothetical, but it is not. 

Open-access journals already exist in the thousands. They operate in exactly the same way as 

traditional subscription journals - providing management of peer review, production services, 

and distribution - with the sole exception that they do not charge for online access, so that access is free and open to anyone. The publication-fee revenue model for open-access journals is a 

proven mechanism. The prestigious non-profit open-access publisher Public Library of Science is 

generating surplus revenue and is on track to publish some 3% of the world biomedical literature 

through its journal PLoS ONE alone. The BioMed Central division of the commercial publisher 

Springer is generating profits for its parent company using the same revenue model. Indeed, the 

growth of open-access journals over the past few years has been meteoric. There are now over 

7,000 open-access journals, 15 many using the publication-fee model, and many of the largest, most 

established commercial journal publishers Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, SAGE - now 

operate open-access journals using the publication-fee revenue model. Were supplemental access 

to cause sufficient price pressure to put the subscription model in danger, the result would merely 

be further uptake of this already burgeoning alternative revenue model. 

In this scenario, the cost of journal publishing would be borne not by the libraries on behalf of 

their readers, but by funding agencies and research institutions on behalf of their authors. Already, 

funding agencies such as Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute underwrite open 

access author charges, and in fact mandate open access. Federal granting agencies such as NSF and 

NIH allow grant funds to be used for open-access publication fees as well (though grantees must 

"According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, http://,,,,,, .doaj .org/. 
65 

9 

prebudget for these unpredictable charges). Not all fields have the sort of grant funding opportunities that could underwrite these fees. For those fields, the researcher's employing institution, as 

de facto funder of the research, should underwrite charges for publication in open-access journals. 

Here again, Harvard has taken an early stand as one of the initial signatories along with Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and University of California, Berkeley - of the Compact for Open-Access 

Publishing Equity, 16 which commits these universities and the dozen or so additional signatories to 

establishing mechanisms for underwriting reasonable open-access publication fees. The Compact 

acknowledges the fact that the services that journal publishers provide are important, cost money, 

and deserve to be funded, and commits the universities to doing so, albeit with a revenue model 

that avoids the market dysfunction of the subscription journal system. 

ADVANTAGES OF THE OPEN-ACCESS PUBLISHING SYSTEM 

The primary advantage of the open-access journal publishing system is the open access that it 

provides. Since revenue does not depend on limiting access to those willing to pay, journals have 

no incentive to limit access, and in fact have incentive to provide as broad access as possible to 

increase the value of their brand. In fact, open-access journals can provide access not only in the 

traditional sense, allowing anyone to access the articles for the purpose of reading them, but can 

provide the articles unencumbered by any use restrictions, thereby allowing the articles to be used, 

re-used, analyzed, and data-mined in ways we are not even able to predict. 

A perhaps less obvious advantage of the publication-fee revenue model for open-access journals 

is that the factors leading to the subscription market failure do not inhere in the publication-fee 

model. Bergstrom and Bergstrom'7 explain why: 

Journal articles differ [from conventional goods such as cars] in that they are not 

substitutes for each other in the same way as cars are. Rather, they are complements. 

Scientists are not satisfied with seeing only the top articles in their field. They want 

access to articles of the second and third rank as well. Thus for a library, a second 

copy of a top academic journal is not a good substitute for a journal of the second 

rank. Because of this lack of substitutability, commercial publishers of established 

second-rank journals have substantial monopoly power and are able to sell their 

product at prices that are much higher than their average costs and several times 

higher than the price of higher quality, non-profit journals . 

• ..http://ww.oaeompaet.org/.SeealsoStuartM.Shieber. Equity for open-access journal publishing, PLo5 Biology, volume 7, number 8 (2012). http://dx.doi . org/lO.1371/journal. pbio .1000165 

l7Theodore C. Bergstrom and Carl T. Bergstrom, Can 'author pays' journals compete with 'reader pays'?, Nature Web 

Focus (2004). http://''''''.nature . com/nature/f oeusl aceessdebate/22 . html 
66 

10 

By contrast, the market for authors' inputs appears to be much more competitive. If journals supported themselves by author fees, it is not likely that one Open 

Access journal could charge author fees several times higher than those charged by 

another of similar quality. An author, deciding where to publish, is likely to consider different journals of similar quality as close substitutes. Unlike a reader, who 

would much prefer access to two journals rather than to two copies of one, an author with two papers has no strong reason to prefer publishing once in each journal 

rather than twice in the cheaper one. 

If the entire market were to switch from Reader Pays to Author Pays, competing 

journals would be closer substitutes in the view of authors than they are in the view 

of subscribers. As publishers shift from selling complements to selling substitutes, 

the greater competition would be likely to force commercial publishers to reduce 

their profit margins dramatically. 

Again, the empirical evidence supports this view. Even the most expensive open-access publication fees, such as those of the prestigious Public Library of Science journals, are less than 

$3,000 per article, with a more typical value in the $1,000--1,500 range. By contrast, the average 

revenue per article for subscription journal articles is about $5,000. Thus, the open-access model 

better leverages free market principles: Despite providing unencumbered access to the literature, it 

costs no more overall per article, and may end up costing much less, than the current system. The 

savings to universities and funding agencies could be substantial. 

CONCLUSION 

I began my comments by quoting the mission of academics such as myself to provide the widest 

possible dissemination - open access - to the ideas and knowledge resulting from our research. 

Government, too, has an underlying goal of promoting the dissemination of knowledge, expressed 

in Thomas Jefferson's view that "by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for 

the diffusion of knowledge among the people."18 The federal agencies and science policies that 

this committee oversees have led to knowledge breakthroughs of the most fundamental sort - in 

our understanding of the physical universe, in our ability to comprehend fundamental biological 

processes, and, in my own field, in the revolutionary abilities to transform and transmit information. 

Open access policies build on these information technology breakthroughs to maximize the 

return on the taxpayers' enormous investment in that research, and magnify the usefulness of 

that research. They bring economic benefits that far exceed the costs. The NIH has shown one 

18Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Wythe (13 August, 1786). http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj. 

mtjbib002184 
67 

11 

successful model, which could be replicated at other funding agencies, as envisioned in the recently 

re-introduced bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). 

Providing open access to the publicly-funded research literature - amplifying the "diffusion 

of knowledge" - will benefit researchers, taxpayers, and every person who gains from new 

medicines, new technologies, new jobs, and new solutions to longstanding problems of every kind. 
68 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Mr. Shieber. 

Mr. Plutchak, you are recognized for five minutes. 

STATEMENT OF MR. SCOTT PLUTCHAK, 

DIRECTOR, LISTER HILL LIBRARY, 

UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM 

Mr. PLUTCHAK. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, 

thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today. My 

name is Scott Plutchak, and I am the Director of the Lister Hill 

Library in the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

For over a decade, much of my professional activity has taken 

place at the intersection of librarianship and publishing. Despite 

how dependent these two communities are on each other, it is 

striking how little real conversation and collaboration has taken 

place. One of the unfortunately results of this is that the debates 

over access to the peer-reviewed literature have been unnecessarily 

contentious and have diverted energy and attention from what 

could have been and should have been a careful examination of 

facts and opportunities. 

Open-access advocates are lobbying hard for passage of FRPAA, 

the Federal Research Public Access Act, but I am afraid they are 

being shortsighted. The true value of the peer-reviewed literature 

comes from context when it is connected to the work that comes before it and that provides a foundation for what can be built upon 

it. Because FRPAA focuses so much on access to individual copies 

of articles, it falls far short of what could be and what needs to be 

achieved. I agree that the peer-reviewed reports of federally funded 

research should be made freely available. In the digital world, we 

certainly ought to be able to make that happen, but it must be 

done within a context that maximizes the value of those articles. 

Mere access isn’t enough. 

The report from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable lays out 

the issues that need to be balanced—first, a focus on providing access to the version of record. Like the NIH policy on which it is 

based, FRPAA settles for access to the author’s final manuscript 

version. In most cases, to meet a current need, that may be sufficient, but a robust system of scientific communication that is expected to persist over time requires access to the version that some 

entity is going to keep track of, ensuring that corrections are appropriately made, that retractions are handled when necessary, 

and that context is preserved. 

Second—interoperability standards. Data mining of research reports can combine results to provide accurate summaries across a 

broad range of experiments. When these meta-analyses are performed by humans, they can be extremely beneficial but they are 

very expensive and they take a lot of time. In order to facilitate 

this data mining, we need to emphasize a standardized structure 

for research reports. 

Third—a focus on digital preservation. Although there are several promising approaches underway, these are all still in the experimental stages. A recent study reported that only 15 to 20 percent of the e-journal content in two major research libraries was 

currently being preserved. Any set of policies designed to provide 
69 

access to the results of funded research must take into account 

methods for maintaining access for decades and even centuries. 

Finally, a recognition that different disciplines have different 

practices and needs. One of the most contentious areas in the public access debates has to do with the length of the embargo. It became clear to us on the Roundtable as we investigated the differences among disciplines that 6 months may be longer than necessary in some disciplines and too short to be practical in others. 

While policy development across funding agencies must be carefully 

coordinated, some flexibility must be allowed and even encouraged 

so that agencies can develop policies that are acutely attuned to 

the needs of their disciplinary communities. 

Librarians, researchers, educators, and publishers are all committed to achieving the widest possible distribution of the results 

of scholarly research. The challenge is to do that in ways that balance these elements. My experience with the Roundtable, my other 

work with the librarian and publishing communities over the years 

leaves me convinced that we will be more effective in developing 

those solutions when researchers, educators, publishers, librarians, 

and the public work together than if we continue on a path that 

sets us at odds with each other. 

Across the publishing industry in both commercial and not-forprofit sectors, experiments in open-access publishing are proliferating. It should be clear to any objective observer that most publishers are in no way opposed to open access. They are quite sensibly seeking to develop business models that keep their organizations healthy while maximizing access to what they publish. 

As authorized by the America COMPETES Act, the White House 

Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently reviewing the 

results from its latest request for information. Their approach to 

these questions suggest that they are attempting to achieve the 

kind of balance recommended in the report. Anything that the Congress can do to encourage policy development along those lines will 

be welcome. Anything that impedes or interferes with that work 

such as the passage of FRPAA-type legislation will paradoxically 

make the goal of a truly robust open-access infrastructure for scientific communication even more difficult to achieve. 

Developing federal policies that will maximize the public’s investment in research and provide incentives for the development of a 

robust scholarly communication system is complicated and achieving the appropriate balance of interests may not be as emotionally 

satisfying as advocating the simplicity of something like FRPAA 

but the American public deserves to have us do this right. 

Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Plutchak follows:] 
70 

Testimony of 

T. Scott Plutchak 

Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences 

University of Alabama at Birmingham 

before the 

Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight 

of the 

House Committee on Science, Space and Technology 

concerning 

"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests" 

March 29, 2012 
71 

Chairman Broun, Ranking Member Tonko, Members of the Subcommittee, thank you very 

much for the opportunity to speak to you today on the issues surrounding public access to 

the peer-reviewed reports of federally funded research. My name is Scott Plutchak, and I'm 

currently the director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of 

Alabama at Birmingham. The views I'm expressing today, however, are my own opinions 

and do not in any way represent any official position of my university. 

Historians of the beginning of the print age refer to the fifty year period from about 1450 -

when Gutenberg's press was invented - to about 1500 as the "incunabula period," from the 

Latin word meaning "from the cradle." This was a period of rich experimentation when 

entrepreneurs, scientists and scholars tested the opportunities offered by this powerful 

new technology. What resulted was the beginnings of the great age of print that we all 

grew up in. 

We are now in the incunabula period of the digital age, and the opportunities before us are 

tremendous. Digital technologies for communicating scientific knowledge hold the 

promise for accelerating discovery in ways unimaginable to previous generations. We see 

them affecting every aspect of our social and economic life. Certainly the impact that 

they've had on my world of libraries and librarians has been earth-shattering, and equally 

so for the world of research and education that academic librarians have dedicated 

themselves to. We have it within our grasp to establish a new information infrastructure 

for the communication and advancement of scientific knowledge that builds on the best of 

what we've done in the past, while taking full advantage of the power of these new digital 

information technologies. 

Unfortunately, the debates over access to the peer-reviewed journal literature that have 

taken place over the last decade or so have been unnecessarily contentious and have 

diverted energy and attention from what could have been, and should have been, a careful 

examination of facts and opportunities. The recent flurry of activity surrounding the 

introduction of the Research Works Act (RWA) and the reintroduction of the Federal 

Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) have resulted in a great deal of the kind of 

sloganeering, wishful thinking, and shading of fact in order to score rhetorical points that 

has characterized most of the public debate around Open Access during the past decade. 

The most vocal of the Open Access advocates are lobbying hard for passage of the Federal 

Research Public Access Act, but I'm afraid they are being terribly short-sighted. Passage of 

FRP AA would be the digital equivalent of the first half of the 17th century, and we have the 

opportunity to do so much more. 

The great achievement in SCientific communication in the 17th century was embodied in the 

first two scientific journals - the Journal des S~avans , first published in Paris in January, 

1665, and The Philosophical Transactions o/the Royal Society, appearing in London two 

months later. For the first time, scientific reports would be bundled together and 

disseminated systematically across Europe. It was the result of the best minds of the time 

using the latest technology to advance scientific progress. 
72 

We have the potential now for a similar significant leap forward, but the FRPAA approach 

risks actually take us backward - to a world in which individual reports of scientific results 

are isolated from context, held in scattered repositories, with very little in the way of 

connective tissue. 

The true value of the peer-reviewed literature comes from context, when it is connected to 

the work that comes before it, that is laterally related to it, and that provides a foundation 

for what can be built upon it. 

I completely agree with the notion that the peer-reviewed reports of federally funded 

research should be made freely available. In a digital world where distribution is cheap 

and easy, we certainly ought to be able to figure out a way to make this happen. But I want 

to see this done within a context that maximizes the value of those reports and that takes 

full advantage of the expertise that publishing professionals can bring. Mere access simply 

isn't enough. 

The report from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable,1 which I was fortunate enough to be 

a member of, lays out the issues that need to be balanced in order to achieve a truly robust 

scholarly communication infrastructure that will take full advantage of the opportunities 

before us. 

The key elements are these: 

• A focus on the version of record. FRPAA, like the NIH pUblic access policy on which 

it is based, settles for access to the author's final manuscript version, rather than the 

final published version - the version of record. In most cases, to meet a current 

need, this is probably sufficient. But a robust system of scientific communication 

that is expected to persist over time requires access to the final version, the 

stewarded version; the version that some entity is going to keep track of, ensuring 

that corrections are appropriately made, that retractions are handled when 

necessary, and that permanent access is ensured. At present, we are facing a world 

in which mUltiple versions of articles are available through various repositories and 

websites and it is increasingly difficult for the reader to determine which version 

they are accessing at any point in time. We need to be developing policies that 

minimize the potential for this sort of confusion, rather than exacerbating it. 

• Standards for interoperability. Text-mining and data-mining published research 

reports enables deep analysis of multiple experiments, where individual results can 

be combined to provide accurate summaries across a broad range of experiments. 

When these sorts of meta-analyses are performed by humans, they can be extremely 

beneficial but they are very expensive and require a great deal oftime. We know 

that there is tremendous knowledge embodied in existing research reports if only 

we could effectively analyze it. In order to facilitate this we need to emphasize a 

standardized structure for these reports. It is not necessary for them all to be in a 

single repository if they are structured in standardized ways. The National Library 
73 

of Medicine's "Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite" is well on the way to 

becoming a de facto standard. 

• A focus on preservation. Most of the scientific literature in biomedicine (the area 

that I know the best) is now "born digita\''' and, increasingly, there is no print 

counterpart. While print continues to be an important medium in some areas of the 

social sciences and humanities, this is rapidly declining. Although there are several 

promising approaches at play in providing permanent preservation to born digital 

documents, these are all still in the experimental stages. Any set of policies designed 

to provide access to the results of funded research must take into account methods 

for maintaining access for decades and even centuries into the future. This is not a 

trivial problem, and librarians and archivists understand that it is a critical one. A 

recent study reported that only 15% to 20% of the e-journal content in two major 

research libraries was being preserved by current initiatives.2 

• A recognition that different disciplines may require different policies in order to 

achieve maximum benefit. Just as there is a broad range of adoption of "borndigital" objects across scientific disciplines, so are there differences in funding 

streams and in use of the literature. One of the most contentious areas in the public 

access debates has to do with the length of the embargo. The NIH policy specifies a 

maximum of 12 months; FRPAA would shorten that to 6 months. And yet it became 

clear to us on the Roundtable, as we investigated the differences among disciplines, 

the 6 months would be longer than necessary in some disciplines and too short to be 

practical in others. This highlights the fact that disciplinary differences are so wide 

that any single simple access policy that is intended to apply to all federally funded 

research will have negative unintended consequences in some areas. While policy 

development across funding agencies must be carefully coordinated in order to 

maximize interoperability, some flexibility must be allowed and even encouraged so 

that agencies can develop policies that are acutely tuned to the needs of their 

disciplinary communities. 

• And yes, free access. Librarians, researchers, educators and publishers are all 

committed to achieving the widest possible distribution of the results of scholarly 

research. The opportunity that we have in the digital world is to achieve much 

wider distribution than could be imagined in the print world. The challenge is to do 

that is ways that balance the elements that I mention above. My experience with the 

Roundtable, and my other work with the librarian and publishing communities over 

the years, leaves me convinced that we will be more effective in developing those 

solutions when researchers, educators, publishers, librarians and the public work 

together than if we continue on a path that sets us at odds with each other. Across 

the publishing industry, in both commercial and not-for-profit sectors, experiments 

in open access publishing are proliferating. It should be clear to any objective 

observer that publishers are in no way opposed to open access. They are, quite 

sensibly, seeking to develop business models that keep their organizations healthy, 

while maximizing access to what they publish. 
74 

Although many in the OA community disparage the contributions of traditional publishers, 

it is noteworthy that both the NIH policy and FRPAA are explicitly based on the assumption 

that there is something that publishers are doing that is absolutely vital. Investigators are 

already required by their granting agencies to report the results of their research back to 

the agency and yet compliance with these requirements is shockingly low. A recent study 

estimates that only 22% of registered clinical trials whose results were mandated to be 

reported within twelve months of the conclusion of the study had done SO.3 One could 

argue that better enforcement of the reporting requirements already in place at the funding 

agencies, along with mechanisms to make those reports easily searchable and available 

would do much more toward "making the results of federally funded research available to 

the public" than would result from the passage of something like FRPAA. 

But it is clear that what OA advocates want is not just agency mandated reports - it's the 

peer-reviewed papers that we crave. And despite the endless claims that since peer 

reviewers do not charge for their work, there can't really be very much expense involved in 

doing peer-review, neither NIH nor any other agency has shown any inclination to set up 

their own peer review system. One might ask the question, if publishers add so little value, 

and peer review is accomplished at practically no cost, why not empower the agencies to 

set up their own peer review panels and cut the publishers out altogether? But however 

much derision and disdain the publishing industry has to put up with, it is clear that they 

continue to provide something that even the most fevered OA advocates believe is essential. 

The question we should be asking is how do we maximize that value. And yet, a study by 

Ross and others shows that the results of fewer than 50% of completed clinical trials even 

show up in the peer-reviewed literature within 30 months of the completion of the trial.4 

Without tackling these issues, far more research results will still remain unavailable to the 

public than will become accessible. 

The Research Works Act was a terribly mistimed rearguard action that was designed to 

forestall federal legislation of any kind. It is noteworthy that although the Association of 

American Publishers lauded the act, many individual publishers were quick to distance 

themselves from it. But again, it should be noted that the goal of the Research Works Act 

was not to combat Open Access - it was to forestall federal regulation. Publishers don't 

object to open access, they object to federal regulation. This is hardly surprising. 

Businesses in general prefer less regulation to more regulation. There is nothing peculiar 

to the publishing industry in this. 

Nonetheless, it seems to me that some level of government regulation is appropriate for at 

least that portion of the publishing industry that is focused on communicating the results of 

research. The investments made by taxpayers and the potential benefits to be gained from 

a well-organized and robust system of scientific communication are such that the 

inconveniences of some level of regulation are warranted. 
75 

But framing the question as, "How do we get better access to the peer-reviewed reports of 

research" is merely a pale version of the question that we ought to be asking. which is, 

"How we do we take advantage of digital technologies to develop a robust and innovative 

scientific communication infrastructure that fully takes advantage of the potential of 21 st 

century digital technologies." 

We have reached a point, after over a decade of squabbling about Open Access, when the 

terms of the debate seem to have come entirely down to whether or not someone supports 

something like FRP AA or something like the RW A. And yet, my experiences with the 

Roundtable, and the other work that I've done in this area over the past dozen years have 

convinced me that we can gain so much more than FRPAA offers. But to achieve this we 

will need to come together as a community that includes scholars, educators,librarians, 

publishers, and the public at large. We're going to have to listen to each other and be bold 

and creative. We have to recognize that mere "access" without paying attention to the 

other aspects of a scholarly communication system doesn't get us very much. 

If something like FRPAA is passed into law, it will represent a huge missed opportunity. 

We have already wasted years on a battle that needn't have been fought. As authorized by 

the America COMPETES Act in December of 2010, the White House Office of Science & 

Technology Policy (OSTP) is currently reviewing the results from its latest Request for 

Information. Their approach to these questions suggests that they are attempting to 

achieve the kind of balance recommended in the Roundtable report. Anything that the 

Congress can do to encourage policy development along those lines will be welcome. 

Anything that impedes or interferes with that work, such as the passage of FRP AA-type 

legislation will, paradoxically, make the goal of a truly robust open access infrastructure for 

scientific communication even more difficult to achieve. 

Developing federal policies that will maximize the public's investment in research and 

provide incentives for the development of a robust scholarly communication system is 

complicated, and achieving the appropriate balance of interests may not be as emotionally 

satisfying as advocating the simplicity of something like FRPAA. But the American public 

deserves to have us do this right. 

I Report and Recommendations From the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. January 2010. 

http://www.aau.edu!policy!scholarly publishing roundtable.aspx (Accessed 3/26/12). 

2 Preservation Status of e-Resources: A Potential Crisis in Electronic Journal Preservation. Fall 2011. 

http://www.cni.org/topics/digital-preservation/preservation-status-of-eresources/ (Accessed 3/26/12) 

3 Prayle AP, et. al. Compliance with mandatory reporting of clinical trial results on ClinicaITrials.gov: cross sectional 

study. 8MJ 2012;344:d7373 

4 Ross JS, et. al. Publication of NIH funded trials registered in ClinicaITrials.gov: cross sectional analysis. BMJ 

2012;344:d7292 
76 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Mr. Plutchak. The Chairman will 

now take a unanimous consent request. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would ask unanimous 

consent to insert in the record a letter I have received on this subject from 52 Nobel Prize winners in favor of open access. 

Chairman BROUN. Hearing no objection, so ordered. 

[The information appears in Appendix II.] 

Chairman BROUN. The—we will recess this hearing. We have to 

go vote. We will be back—bring this back into order 10 minutes 

after the beginning of the last vote. 

[Recess.] 

Chairman BROUN. I call the Committee back to order. 

I thank the panel for your testimony, appreciate you all getting 

through it and I apologize for rushing all of you. But we are going 

to have five series of vote today so it is going to be—hopefully, we 

can get through at least one round of questions before the next vote 

series but we will see. 

So if you would please, Members as well as respondents to the 

questions, please try to make them as quick as possible so we can 

get through as many questions as we possibly can. And I will remind you that each member has only five minutes. 

And at this point, I will open the round of questions by recognizing myself for five minutes. 

A question to all of you: is there one-size-fits-all policy that can 

cover the entire Federal Government or do specific agencies and 

disciplines require different approaches? I know Mr. Shieber has 

already—I think it was Mr. Shieber or Mr. Plutchak already dealt 

with that so let me hear from others and we will hear from all you 

all real quick. One size fits all, is that appropriate? Dr. Dylla? 

Dr. DYLLA. Chairman Broun, in an answer—simple answer, no. 

If you look at all the scholarship, it is a very diverse array of activities. And if you look at one of the things we have focused on in our 

testimony and your comments, it is this open-access model where 

the author pays the full costs of a publisher providing its added 

value. That works very well for a well funded field that has lots 

of federal funding. I think it appears to work well for medicine. It 

probably works well for some disciplines like physics and chemistry, parts of it. But for mathematics and social sciences there is 

very little grant structure out there. It would be very difficult for 

that particular one size to fit all. 

Chairman BROUN. Mr. Maxwell? 

Mr. MAXWELL. There is one aspect of one-size-fits-all that I think 

in fact is true across the fields and that is that increased public access has substantial public benefit. And that is why I would like 

to stress the notion of starting with that and if necessary tweaking 

that. As to Fred’s comment, the—what you see in the publishing 

world are lots of different models and the models have been changing. We are seeing lots of proprietary journals having—becoming 

hybrids, having some part of open access. You see a remarkable 

growth of open-access journals, 7,500 over the last decade. 

If the—if we start with the notion of increasing public access and 

that that is a benefit and then if you want to ratchet back and say 

this might not work in this particular environment, one way of 

doing it—and we didn’t study this in the report but one way of 
77 

thinking about it is to say we will have a 6-month embargo across 

all federal funding but we will wait for a year and each of the departments can have a proceeding in that year that would say with 

respect to our granting, here is what would be the optimum solution. Here is what fits us. But without a kind of pressure from legislation, this can go on and on and on when the benefits that we 

lose every day from reduced public access are meaningful. They are 

meaningful for the progress of science, they are meaningful for innovation, they are meaningful for the benefits for the society. 

Chairman BROUN. Dr. Taylor? 

Dr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With all due respect, I 

might question the premise of the question. I don’t think mandates 

are required at all. So whether a one-size-fits-all mandate is okay 

or not is perhaps not the right question. So, for example, as to 

these journals made freely available by our choice 12 months after 

publication, we have decided in our little niche in our business 

structure that this is an okay way to provide public access to the 

literature that we publish. We have done that on our own without 

anybody telling us to do that. And that is true for many other publishers in a number of disciplines. 

Chairman BROUN. Anybody else? Mr. Shieber? 

Mr. SHIEBER. I was just going to mention in terms—one of the 

main areas in which people object to a one-size-fits-all solution is 

in the area of the length of embargos. And it may well be that different fields would like different embargo lengths, but the issue is 

not that. The issue is what is the embargo length that allows the 

maximum access while maintaining viability of the publishing system overall? As far as we know, there is no evidence that—certainly NIH embargo length of 12 months is problematic and of all 

biomedical funders, NIH seems to be an outlier in their embargo 

length, most requiring a 6-month embargo. So I think the burden 

of proof would be on finding evidence that a longer embargo would 

be needed rather than starting with a long embargo and shortening. 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Mr. Shieber. 

Mr. Plutchak, you want to—— 

Mr. PLUTCHAK. I think I have answered that in my testimony. 

Chairman BROUN. Okay. I thought you did. 

And my time is expired. I now recognize Mr. Tonko for five minutes. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Mr. Plutchak rightly said that the question we ought to be asking is how do we take advantage of digital technologies to develop 

a robust and innovative scientific communication infrastructure 

that would then fully take advantage of the potential of our 21st 

century digital technologies. Much of the innovation in publishing 

and access is happening organically as we move further into the 

digital age. Some of this was pushed a little faster by the 2008 NIH 

policy and then the 2010 COMPETES language, but all of these efforts and the tone of the debate have come a long way since 

FRPAA was first introduced in 2006. 

So let me ask each of our panelists the following: are there 

downsides to giving markets and technology time to work their 

magic, especially in the light of the immense amount of activity al-
78 

ready going on and the COMPETES-driven agency efforts? Mr. 

Plutchak, maybe we will start with you, please? 

Mr. PLUTCHAK. Yeah, there is a downside in the sense that I 

think Mr. Maxwell has addressed, the benefits of making things 

open quickly, but I always look at these things as a need to balance 

upsides and downsides. Everything has downsides. And my concern 

is that by focusing so much on the upside of making openness 

achievable quickly, we don’t pay enough attention to the factors of 

interoperability, of preservation, the other things that are managed 

that have to be balanced. And I think overall, those—the downside 

of potential delay is worth taking that time to make sure that we 

are developing policies that are really effective for the long-term. 

Mr. TONKO. Mr. Shieber? 

Mr. SHIEBER. Yes, I am definitely a proponent of letting markets 

work their magic and for that reason I think it behooves us to 

make sure that the scholarly communication mechanism that we 

have is based on a well functioning market. Unfortunately, the 

reader-side payment, the subscription revenue model has economic 

properties that lead to market dysfunction and they are very clearly displayed. One nice thing about the writer-side or author-side 

payment model, publication fee revenue model, is that it doesn’t 

have those same market dysfunctions. So ideally, we would be moving in the direction of open-access journals based on author-side 

fees. 

And to say a word about why that is, from the point of view of 

a reader, two journals are complements of each other. You would 

like both. You want access to both. In fact, access to one provides 

motivation to get access to the other because they cite each other. 

From the point of view of a writer, two journals are substitutes and 

therefore compete with each other. So you have a competitive market on the writer side, a monopolistic market on the reader side. 

So we should be moving towards the writer side in general, that 

is in the direction of open-access journals. 

Mr. TONKO. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Taylor? 

Dr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Ranking Member Tonko. I think that, 

as Scott said, there are downsides to everything and I would agree 

with his assessment that in this instance the downside to letting 

the organic growth with some impaling inputs proceed is the right 

way forward. I think there is also an important distinction between 

access for the public and access for scholarships. So we can measure access. And as Mr. Maxwell said, the NIH policy is allowing a 

lot more people to access the content that is available through 

PubMed Central. But the evidence that I am aware of that scholars 

are using that content anymore than they were already using journal content available through other means is just not there in 

terms of citations to the articles that are made available. So I don’t 

think that is not much in the way of downside and I think we 

should wait. 

Mr. TONKO. Okay, thank you. And Mr. Maxwell? 

Mr. MAXWELL. Yes, thanks for the opportunity. Just three 

points—one is there are very good economic indicators and research 

showing that access does in fact lead to more people reading them, 

more diverse forms of experimentation, more innovation. And from 

the MIT economists who do this study, the answer is clear not only 
79 

in terms of other people’s citations but faster commercialization of 

the research. 

The second point is that I do believe in markets, and the change 

in the markets as a result of the NIH policy have meant a growth 

of companies that are taking the PubMed Central information and 

turning it into useful products that were not available before for 

scholars, not for the general public. So it goes beyond not only benefits to the general public but the benefits of the scholars. 

The third part is if you start from the premise as I do that the 

taxpayer funded this research and we want to get as much return 

from this research as we can, I would say you make this available 

by legislation and you let markets work as they are working now 

and as people are changing their models to adjust for that. But 

they—it is—the debate is not about this—the health or wellness of 

the proprietary publishing industry; it is about how to get the dissemination of government-funded research out to as many people 

so we can get as much innovation and as much commercialization 

as we can do it. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you. And Dr. Dylla I will get to you in the 

next round. 

Chairman BROUN. The gentleman’s time has expired. I am sorry 

about that, Mr. Tonko. 

Ms. Lofgren, you are recognized for five minutes. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And 

I think this is an important hearing. 

I was mentioning that I was—I am a member of the Judiciary 

Committee and Intellectual Property Subcommittee and we have 

had a review of this subject there from the copyright point of view, 

and essentially really this is a copyright exception if you want to 

get down to what we are talking about. And copyrights are a onesize-fits-all. I mean right now you get the life of the author plus 

70 years and you lock it down and there it is. And the question is 

do we want to make an exception for federally funded research in 

the interest of science. 

And full disclosure, I am a cosponsor of the Federal Research 

Public Access Act because I think if you take—if you really dig 

down into it, you have to reach the conclusion that that is going 

to serve us better. 

You know, when we have disruptive technologies, incumbents 

who have done—I am not critical; I mean they have played an important role but the world changes and it is difficult to change. And 

I think about there is for-profits that are making, you know—one 

company that does the outsourcing of journal production for smaller societies earned $3.3 billion last year. I mean that is something 

they don’t want to give up. I understand that. The small societies, 

this is an important source of revenue for them, I mean, because 

they are paid fees and it is important I think to America that those 

societies persist. So the question is how can that happen if this 

model changes, which inevitably it will? 

And finally, I guess it is to the peer-review process and how can 

we make sure that there is value added in the publication? And I 

guess that is the question I have for the witnesses. It is worth 

pointing out that the bill that Mr. Doyle has introduced permits 

peer review journals to have some exceptions and the like while al-
80 

lowing the author to not be constrained as is often the case when 

an author gives up their rights to the publisher. 

And the question is as the NIH has moved forward in this area 

is I haven’t seen any evidence that there has been an adverse impact. And I am wondering if anybody can cite data to me that delineates the adverse impact from the policy. 

Dr. TAYLOR. Thank you. I will start there in the middle of your 

questioning, Representative Lofgren, when you mentioned that 

small professional societies are vital to the fabric of the country 

and scholarship here. As a Director of one of those societies, I 

couldn’t agree more. 

As to how to help ASPB and other smaller societies—— 

Ms. LOFGREN. Actually, the question I had was about data damaged from the NIH policy. Do you have any data on that? 

Dr. TAYLOR. The only data I have—and it would not necessarily 

imply damage—but is—has to do with the usage of our journal articles over time, so the fact that most of the usage is happening 

after the first six months. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I don’t have a lot of—Mr. Maxwell, maybe you 

have data. 

Mr. MAXWELL. Well, the only data that we found in the public 

record were assertions by the publishers that there was damage 

and a citation of a study that took place before the policy went into 

effect that said librarians might cancel. We looked very hard for 

the evidence and we asked people about it. What I might suggest 

is that the people—that you look at the financial analysts who 

looked at this science and technology publishing sector and those 

folks say, one, that the publishers come to them and say this is not 

a real big deal for us. And they say that their rate of profit growth 

after the recession is likely to come back up to six and seven percent as opposed to the four percent profit growth during the recession. We don’t see economic damage and we don’t see the publishers telling the analysts who advise investors that this is a problem. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Well, Elsevier had a 37 percent profit margin. 

Mr. MAXWELL. They are higher in general than most businesses 

because they have per article a monopoly. If you want this article, 

you have to get it from Elsevier unless you are willing to wait for 

6 months or 12 months or whatever. And people who need it, in 

particular the private sector people who would build on this don’t 

want to wait. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Well, I just—my time is just about up but I would 

note I haven’t heard anybody cite data, and since this is the 

Science Committee, we are data-driven. But the loss cannot be calculated because it is what didn’t get invented; it is what didn’t get 

discovered because of the lack of information. That can never be 

calculated. 

And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back. 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Ms. Lofgren. 

We will go to our second round of questions now, and Chairman 

recognizes himself for five minutes. 

Mr. Dylla’s testimony notes the projects at DOE and NSF related 

to public access. Would everyone please comment on projects such 

as these, whether they are a model for other agencies to follow and 
81 

whether they provide any guidance on how Congress should address public access? The whole panel, we will start out with Mr.— 

Dr. Dylla. Go ahead, sir. 

Dr. DYLLA. The previous question addressed the proper role of 

government in the marketplace and what has been put in place 

with the collaborations dictated by the—Section 103 of the COMPETES Act I feel is working out very nicely with two agencies that 

I have spent 35 years working with—the Department of Energy 

and the National Science Foundation. 

I give you one cogent example of about a half-dozen pilot projects 

that we have been working on since the COMPETES Act was 

passed. A very simple question that one of you might ask a program manager from the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy is, please, Mr. Program Manager, can you tell 

me how many scholarly publications resulted from your funding 

last year? And that is a very difficult thing to answer because it 

turns out an author puts that required information that the underlying research was funded by one of those agencies in an arbitrary 

place in the journal. It might be in the acknowledgement; it might 

be in a footnote. It is buried. So for the agency to dig out that information by itself requires quite a bit of data mining. 

A consortium of publishers called CrossRef, which includes many 

libraries and research institutions, has a funded project now that 

includes those two funding agencies that allow any of the 11 funding agencies to identify the articles that result from their funding 

with the Social Security number that my colleague, Crispin Taylor, 

mentioned, the Digital Object Identifier number. So a random 

member of the public could come to the NSF website and find the 

author, the institution, and the title of the articles by year, and 

when they see that DOI number, they would be linked to the 

version of record on the publisher’s site. And if they don’t happen 

to have a subscription, there are 40 publishers within our consortium that are—have been piloting for the last year a modest cost 

article rental model. We have been doing it for about a year and 

a half at the American Institute of Physics. Eight million people a 

year come to our website. They are mainly researchers. Three thousand people came which we assume were random members of the 

public to take advantage of this service. 

But that is just one example of the partnerships and pilot 

projects that have been put in place as a result of the COMPETES 

Act. 

Chairman BROUN. Mr. Shieber? 

Mr. SHIEBER. Yes. I wanted to use Dr. Dylla’s example, talk a little bit about that. He talked about a project to allow funders to figure out what—how many papers were being acknowledged as a 

project I think with NSF now. And first of all, of course, this is not 

a project to increase access to the articles but it does provide useful 

information. But it also gives us the opportunity to look at a phenomenon I think is important, which is how openness often trumps 

other kinds of functionalities. 

For the open-access literature, of course, you can imagine automatic computer analysis of the open articles to data mine for exactly this information. In fact, a computer science colleague of mine 

at Penn State has actually implemented such a system only avail-
82 

able for the open-access literature that automatically data mines 

the acknowledgements of articles and anybody can search—you can 

search for an NSF grant number and see all the articles that at 

least that are openly available for which the data mining is possible that acknowledge the funder. So these kind of projects are 

wonderful and necessary to the extent that they allow this kind of 

functionality for the closed literature, but of course, they would be 

redundant if the literature were just open in the first place. 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Mr. Shieber. My time is about expired. And by the way, if any of you all—we are going to give you 

some written questions and any of the questions that you are asked 

if anybody wants to weigh in and give us an answer, we would appreciate that. 

I now recognize Mr. Tonko for five minutes. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Dr. Dylla, why don’t we go back to the earlier question that unfortunately you didn’t have a chance to answer? And that was 

about the downsides to giving markets and technology time to work 

their magic. Do you cite any downsides? 

Dr. DYLLA. Post the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable and many 

of its recommendations showing up in the Section 103 of COMPETES, I think most of the downsides have been minimized because you have all cohorts working together, government as the 

funder of scientific research, the scientists and librarians and publishers working together on these issues as the COMPETES Act 

proposed. So as you mentioned in your opening statement, Representative Tonko, this has only been in place for about a year and 

we should let this play out and it is playing out. It won’t solve all 

the problems as quickly as everyone wants those problems solved, 

but I think it is playing out very nicely. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you. 

And a question to perhaps you and Dr. Taylor, grant awards are 

peer-reviewed before the research is done, and when the research 

is finished the only peer review the results receive is at the stage 

of submission for publication. And with our two Ph.D. scientists on 

the panel, I wonder if you can explain why peer review is important to the progress of science, and how emerging publishing trends 

may be changing that peer-review process? And by the way, any of 

you can respond to this but I thought perhaps our two scientists 

might want to. Dr. Taylor? 

Dr. TAYLOR. Thank you very much, Ranking Member Tonko. 

So I think peer review is important for a whole bunch of different 

reasons at the level of journal publication. Most importantly, the 

function of peer review is to assess the validity of the conclusions 

that the author of the article is drawing from his or her research 

work. So I think that is the fundamental level. And that toggle is 

really important because without that stamp of validity, it is impossible to accept the statements as valid and true. 

The more subtle parts of peer review have to do with things like 

novelty and impact, which are—novelty is not—is easy to quantify 

but impact is perhaps a little bit qualitative. And this has to do 

with author choice and their assessment of the novelty and impact 

of their journal articles in terms of where in the hierarchy of journals they choose to submit their work in the first place. So in addi-
83 

tion to providing a basic level of this is good work, this is sound 

work, peer review is also sort of a ranking system in terms of the 

community—the scientific community’s assessment of the impact of 

our work. 

Mr. TONKO. And with any of the publishing trends, is there anything that may change that peer review? 

Dr. TAYLOR. That is a good question. It is already changing. A 

very prominent publication called PLoS ONE that is relatively new 

has a form of peer review that focuses on the first part of what I 

said—this is sound work—but is less interested in the second 

part—this is particularly impactful or novel work. And it is a model 

that is working very well for PLoS ONE and that a number of 

other publishers are attempting to replicate. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you. Dr. Dylla? 

Dr. DYLLA. I think everyone on the witness stand here would 

agree that the most fundamental value that the publishing enterprise brings to science is this peer-review process. And it is often 

said, well, publishers don’t pay the peer reviewers. As an academic, 

we do this—we feel this is the most important part of our service 

to the Academy. We write articles, we expect them to be reviewed 

by our peers, we become peer reviewers for our colleagues. 

But I will give you an example from the American Institute of 

Physics. We publish 15,000 physics articles every year in five journals. We have to manage the peer-review process for about 50,000 

reviewers. That involves paying about 130 Ph.D. scientists all over 

the world. We pay down their academic time so they can help us 

manage this. So this is not a cost-free process. Often, when the argument goes to let’s just put it up the web and have it crowdsourced, I remind you the difference between a restaurant you—a 

restaurant review you might get from one of these crowd-sourced 

reviews and one that you get from Michelin when an expert spends 

five different visits. It is not quite the perfect analogy but it works 

somewhat. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you very much. I yield back. 

Chairman BROUN. The gentleman’s time is expired. Thank you, 

Mr. Tonko. 

Now, I recognize Ms. Lofgren for five minutes. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Well, thank you very much. You know, as I am listening here, you know, I am thinking that really the journals 

have—they served a function as gatekeepers, and I don’t mean that 

necessarily in a negative sense. I mean there is a pro and con. You 

know, some say there is good research that never got out because 

of it and others, you know, you kept out flimflam and there is probably truth in both assertions. But it is a model that I think ultimately is unsustainable in the current environment. I mean you 

have got—the scientists are not paid anything. The peer reviewers 

are not paid anything. And I grant you that I am sure it does cost 

to manage a large number of the peer reviewers, so I am not discounting that and I see that as an identified need to address, because whether Mr. Doyle’s bill passes or not, the current model is 

going to fall apart. Because there is no reason why a for-profit company should make $3 billion when the scientists aren’t paid and 

the peer reviewers aren’t paid and there is a possibility to structure 

this in a completely different way. 
84 

And so the question I have is whether or not Congress does 

something or whether we just let this morph. It is going to change. 

And how do we identify and protect the things that are valuable 

to protect, which is the need for peer review—that is not going to 

be a barrier to publication but certainly of value to the scientific 

community—and a further need which is to support the scientific 

societies, especially the smaller ones that get some revenue from 

the current system and will not be able to do that. When the Internet and connectivity blows them away, how do we preserve those 

good societies that give value? 

And instead of—you know, I have seen this over in the Judiciary 

Committee where content holders cling to old business models and 

it is ultimately a failing effort, and it would be smart to think 

about how do we preserve the good things? So if people have comments on that. 

Mr. PLUTCHAK. It is a great question and I think it really is the 

critical question. A couple of points to make. In regard to the cost 

issue and publishers, it is important to recognize that Elsevier, although they get all of our attention—and certainly as a librarian 

I share the frustration of my colleagues—they only control about 20 

percent of the journal publishing. Most publishers don’t come anywhere near these 37 percent profit margins. And as much as I 

would like to see a system in which we do not have a single company having that kind of control at those sorts of margins, I think 

we have to recognize that most publishers don’t come close to that. 

Look at the Public Library of Science, which is considered to be— 

their flagship journals are absolutely as high-quality as any. They 

charge around a little less than $3,000 a piece to publish an article. 

They recognize that there is that cost. So we have to be a little bit 

careful about that argument about how much—what is done for 

free and what is not. But then I think moving forward towards how 

we pull this together, I don’t think it is a question of do we legislate something now or do we just let it go? I think we have to work 

through the process that brings these stakeholders together. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Or not. I mean the Federal Government has paid 

for this research and we have an interest and the taxpayers have 

an interest in getting that information out as swiftly as possible if 

there is no damage done. 

Mr. Maxwell, you were looking eager to add in. 

Mr. MAXWELL. Well, the only thing I would probably differ with 

my colleague on the panel about the profitability of the sector. It 

is not only Elsevier that has had higher-than-normal returns of 

capital but a number of publishers. In fact, the largest publishers 

have had a higher return of capital and a long-term ability to raise 

their subscription rates over the last 30 years. 

I do think that Dr. Taylor’s point which he made earlier about 

the success of the PLoS model, which is one in which the author 

pays and which there is already a kind of working peer-review system for—that produces the quality that he had mentioned means 

that you have the kind of market innovation that you are seeking. 

There are ways of doing this, of ensuring quality consistent with 

open access and we should be encouraging that. 
85 

I don’t think that we should believe that change will occur as 

quickly as I think it should absent the presence of legislation 

and—— 

Ms. LOFGREN. If I may, my time is running out. I agree which 

is why I am a cosponsor of the bill, but I think even if the bill does 

not pass, this model is dead. It is just a question of how long the 

patient is going to be on life support. 

I yield back. 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Ms. Lofgren. 

We will go to our third and final round of questions so I will 

yield myself five minutes. 

To the panel, PubMed Central blocks mass downloading for a variety of reasons, one of which is general piracy from countries such 

as China. How serious is this issue and are there examples of mass 

downloading attempts at other online journals and archives? 

Second question, should limitations be placed on access to prevent misuse? How should that be decided and who should decide 

it? And thirdly, should research funded by U.S. taxpayers be made 

publicly available to non-U.S. taxpayers? Could this even be prevented? The panel? Dr. Taylor? 

Dr. TAYLOR. I think I can say a few words about the first and 

the third question. It is very hard for us to assess whether and if 

it is happening the extent of damage from mass downloading from 

sites like PubMed Central because we get very little usage data 

from PubMed Central. We don’t know who specifically is using our 

content on the PubMed Central site, so we can’t speak to 

downloads—mass downloads; we can’t even assess whether it is library users who would be potential subscribers for the Society that 

are using the content. So I can’t answer that question. 

In terms of making publicly—making content produced following 

research funded by the U.S. taxpayer available universally, you 

know, for a society like ASPB, that is okay. And one of the problems that I have with bills like FRPAA is they are focused only on 

the content that is produced from research funded by the U.S. taxpayer. As a professional society with members around the world 

publishing papers from authors around the world, if we want to 

disseminate that content, we want to disseminate it to everyone, 

not only with a narrow focus on the United States or on research 

funded by the U.S. taxpayer. 

Chairman BROUN. Dr. Dylla? 

Dr. DYLLA. Let me address the download problem. Let me start 

by saying the scholarly publishing industry is an industry that embraced the Internet in its early days. We are not a Johnny-comelately to this Internet storm. Our journals at the American Institute of Physics and our sister societies went on—started going online in 1994, about two years after the web was invented by a 

group of physicists I remind you. And what happened—— 

Chairman BROUN. Not by Al Gore? 

Dr. DYLLA. No, it was not. When we made the print-to-online 

transition, if you take a typical university in the area here like the 

University of Maryland, research university—our offices are on 

their campus—we, in the print days, probably had 10 subscriptions 

coming into the campus, the main library and sister libraries, we 

went online. There were suddenly all 40,000 people who had a 
86 

Maryland.edu address could get that content. And to address inappropriate use we would have circuit breakers on how many 

downloads at a particular email address. And if you suddenly saw 

10,000 downloads, that was somebody that was doing no good. 

And so the industry as itself—and I am a member of the Executive Committee of two of our trade associations for scholarly publishers that include a broad representation of nonprofits and profits—we carefully monitor this but it is—you can only pick and 

choose an occasional flagrant. And they—it is like piracy in other 

types of intellectual property. 

Chairman BROUN. Okay. Mr. Shieber? 

Mr. SHIEBER. Yeah, I did want to question perhaps a presumption in part of your question which is that mass downloading is 

somehow inherently bad. There are, of course, good reasons to 

allow mass downloading where rights to do so are available. And 

I think the prohibitions against PubMed Central mass downloading 

have to do with the fact that they don’t have the rights to allow 

mass downloading, arbitrary use of the data. They just have rights 

to allow researchers to download individual articles. For the subset 

that they do have rights, the so-called open access subset of 

PubMed Central, they do allow mass downloading. And in fact, 

Harvard participates in that and downloads those articles en 

masse. So—and the various uses that can be made including text 

mining of that data. So to the extent that there were broad rights 

to allow that more generally, mass downloading would be a useful 

thing to be able to do. 

Chairman BROUN. Well, we are just trying to prevent folks who 

are up to no good from mass downloading and make it harder to 

be able to do so that is questioned. 

My time has expired. I now recognize Mr. Tonko for five minutes. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

This public policy area is a bit new to me so I am trying to get 

a better understanding of the interpretation of the NIH policy. Perhaps across the panel if you could address the adopting of NIH as 

a policy by agencies, all agencies. Is that a good thing? Is it a functional policy or is there modification that would have to be made? 

I just would like to hear your thoughts about imposing that or 

adopting it at all agencies. Sure, Dr. Dylla. 

Dr. DYLLA. Going back to the discussion on the floor already 

about one size doesn’t fit all, there are fields where the 6-month 

proposed embargo I feel would be very inappropriate, even for the 

fields that the American Institute of Physics represents. The journals that we publish for the physics community and one of our sister sites, the American Physical Society, has equal number of journals. If you look at how those are distributed just here in the 

United States, 40 percent of our subscription income comes from 

small colleges and universities that are not research universities. 

So if we were to go to a different business model where that content would have to be given away in 6 months, I remind you what 

the unit of time that a librarian works with. It is one subscription 

year. At these small colleges and universities, it is the librarian 

who has intense budget pressures might say, well, we don’t want 

to have those subscriptions anymore. And I think we would be 

looking at a sizeable disruption of our source of income, which is 
87 

used to promote physics for the general welfare. We do a lot of outreach in media and student education activities with those funds. 

We would find it very disruptive to put our entire business model 

into that one type. 

Mr. TONKO. Mr. Maxwell, we will go across the table here. 

Mr. MAXWELL. As I said earlier, I think that the thing that is 

common across every field is that there would be benefits to the 

public if materials were made available. And we should start there 

because that is the undisputable fact across the panel. More access 

means more research means more commercialization and quicker 

commercialization and more economic growth. If there is to be a 

differentiation—because the NIH policy is I think by most lights a 

very great success—if we take that as a model and say perhaps 

that the agency could have a policy process that says within a year 

you decide whether for your community this works, that at least 

would be able to move this process and get the benefits more quickly available. And then let people try to see whether there is something unique about that. But it is this lost innovation that bothers 

me when—which would be if we kind of dribble out the policy while 

people protect their margins. 

Mr. TONKO. All right, thank you. Dr. Taylor? 

Dr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Ranking Member Tonko. 

I would like to just remind everybody that the NIH policy came 

into effect as a few sentences in an appropriations bill, arguably 

without due consideration in a committee like this one. That being 

said, I think there are two parts to the policy. One is the imposition of an embargo period. The second is a requirement that articles be deposited in a centrally operated, government-run archive. 

I think, you know, we have talked about embargos but with regard 

to the second aspect of this, in this day and age such an archive 

is simply not necessary. The information is there available on the 

Internet and discoverable and usable without having to have it in 

one place. So in that sense, the NIH is in my opinion wasting 

money on PMC. 

Increasingly, PMC is duplicating. It is looking an awful lot like 

our platforms, our publishing platforms and it is becoming increasingly competitive with the publishers directly, which I think is a 

problem, too. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you. We have about a minute left so if I could 

have Mr. Shieber and Mr. Plutchak split that time, I would love 

to hear your comment. 

Mr. SHIEBER. I won’t repeat other comments that have been 

made but I will make one mention about the issue of whether there 

should be a central repository or some other mechanism. To the extent that the mechanism in whatever bill that one imagines doesn’t 

mandate a central repository, that is fine so long as the articles can 

then be mined and mirrored in government-run repositories and 

more broadly than that. But if—but I would avoid a prohibition 

against doing the kind of—making the kind of uses that do allow 

for preservation and government repositories and the like. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you. Mr. Plutchak? 

Mr. PLUTCHAK. Just very quickly, the two basic limitations that 

I see with extending the NIH policy we have alluded to this central 
88 

repository which I think is unnecessary and a lack of focus on the 

version of record. I think that needs to be stressed in any policy. 

Mr. TONKO. Thank you. 

Chairman BROUN. The gentleman’s time is expired. 

I now recognize Ms. Lofgren for five minutes. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Yes, I am wondering if you could tell me on behalf 

of the American society for the plants and the physics institute, 

what percentage of the revenue for your institute, for your society 

comes from publishing and the publishing—this whole business? 

Dr. TAYLOR. Thank you very much for the question, Representative Lofgren. For ASPB it is roughly 80 percent of our revenues 

come from publishing. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Okay. How about physics? 

Dr. DYLLA. It is more than 90 percent. We don’t have members; 

we just have Member Societies so a typical scientific society will 

have income from member dues and from running meetings. All of 

our income virtually comes from publishing. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Okay. So that is, I mean, a major challenge in 

terms of if we want to preserve a multiplicity of societies as this 

model changes, whether quickly through legislation or naturally 

because of the disruptive technologies, we have got to come up with 

some strategies to support these scientific societies that are workable. And I would hope—this is not the subject of this hearing, but 

I think it would be a good subject for a hearing. How are we going 

to be able to do that? 

I would like to—let me just ask a question—and I see Mr. Maxwell and Dr. Taylor want to address the first subject, but Dr. Taylor said something I thought was very interesting, which is the exemption being proposed is limited to taxpayer funded and why that 

would be. And one of the options that we have is to remove copyright protection from publishers who do not compensate—and have 

the copyright ownership remain only with the author him or herself. And that would be true worldwide because anything published 

in the United States, no matter who the ethnicity or origin of the 

author, is subject to copyright law within the United States. I am 

wondering—that would be even more disruptive than Mr. Doyle’s 

bill but would that actually serve—Mr. Maxwell, you are nodding. 

I don’t know if that is what Dr. Taylor had in mind but that is the 

logical extension of his comments. How would that work at a Harvard? How would that work, Mr. Maxwell? 

Mr. MAXWELL. Well, I think that would throw all the cards up 

in the air. I am not advocating that and the report didn’t advocate 

that. What I did want to—the point that I did want to make about 

the societies is that the revenue streams that are generated by— 

for the societies through the publishing isn’t necessarily going to go 

away. The PLoS model is that the author pays. And so there is a 

revenue stream that keeps coming. It is not saying you are deprived ultimately of the revenue; you are deprived of a particular 

business model, which is a subscription-based business model. And 

more and more of the subscription-based models are becoming hybrids in which they are partially author-paid. 

Ms. LOFGREN. If I may, I question whether that can survive as 

a model either. I mean we are moving from—away from a scarcitybased system, and why would an author pay a gatekeeper when 
89 

you can develop through universities or others completely other 

systems that meet the scientific requirements just as well? 

Dr. TAYLOR. Because the scholarly publishers are providing the 

services of peer review, which we talked about earlier and ranking, 

which are—the peer review is fundamentally important for the reasons we have discussed. The ranking allows other scholars to assess that particular piece of research in the context of the larger 

body. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Shieber? 

Mr. SHIEBER. Yeah, Representative Lofgren, I think you are exactly right on focusing on where the scarcity is and you are right 

that the technology changes that balance and the scarcity of access 

is now completely artificial. But there is still—as Dr. Taylor says, 

there is still an item of scarcity and that is the effort that goes 

into—that is involved in the peer-review process that ends up being 

uncompensated, but the management of the peer-review process is 

compensated to the publishers, the copyediting, typesetting, and 

imprimatur of the journal. All of those kinds of things are. 

Now, those are all costs—real costs and important—provide important services. They scale with the number of submissions and 

articles, not with the amount of access. And that is why a revenue 

model that also is based on that side of the equation makes a lot 

of sense, in addition to the fact that it is not based on a monopolistic product—— 

Ms. LOFGREN. Um-hum. 

Mr. SHIEBER. —and the fact that it doesn’t embed a moral hazard and all kinds of other economic advantages. So I don’t—I am 

not sure I agree with your claim about the unsustainability of the 

whole system. I think—— 

Ms. LOFGREN. Well, I always like to throw disruptive statements 

out there in Christensen form. But I think your comment is a very 

thoughtful one and actually delineates the very useful role played 

by the societies and the journals, and the potential way for that to 

be sustained economically. 

Mr. SHIEBER. Can I mention one other thing? It highlights potentially extraordinarily important role for government, which is to— 

just as government funding agencies and universities have been 

subsidizing on the reader side by buying subscriptions, government 

funding agencies and universities should be willing to subsidize on 

the writer side for these kind of author-side payment models to put 

them at a level playing field. In fact, Harvard has done just that 

in cooperation with a small set of other universities by committing 

to paying reasonable open-access publication fees. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I see my time has expired. I would just like to say, 

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate that you have held this hearing because although the Judiciary Committee with jurisdiction over 

copyright has looked at this, there is no way that we would ever 

have gotten into this discussion which is how to organize the funding of science so that this is preserved. So that is very helpful. 

Thank you very much. 

Chairman BROUN. Thank you, Ms. Lofgren. In fact, I have a very 

strong opinion about property rights, including intellectual property. And I thank you and all the members for their questions. 
90 

And I thank all of you all, the Members of the panel, for you all’s 

valuable testimony. If you don’t know southern, y’all means all of 

you all. But Members may have additional questions, and actually, 

I would like to submit some of our oral questions to all of you all 

so that if you want to add something if somebody did not have a 

chance to speak, I would appreciate you all’s expeditious answer in 

writing to those questions. Members can submit questions for written answer. The record will remain open for two weeks for additional comments from Members. The witnesses are excused and the 

hearing is now adjourned. Thank you all. 

[Whereupon, at 11:26 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 
91 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS
92 

ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS

Responses by Dr. H. Frederick Dylla 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight 

Questions for the Record 

"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests" 

Thursday, March 29, 2012 

9:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

Dr. Frederick Dylla, 

Executive Director and CEO, American Institute of Physics 

Questions submitted by Dr. Paul Broun. Chairman. Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight 

Pricing Issues 

1. Concerns have been raised that the prices of many scholarly journals continue to 

increase sharply. Do you agree with these concerns? If so, what are the reasons for 

these price increases and how does this impact the exchange of new scientific 

knowledge? 

In compliance with anti-trust considerations, publishers do not engage in discussion of journal 

prices nor do we undertake analyses of journal pricing patterns in the industry. However, there 

are research patterns to be taken into account and library-produced analyses of serials' pricing. 

Research output 

Starting in the 19S0s, the increase in scientific output as the number of practicing scientists and 

number of research articles produced have grown at a fairly consistent rate of 3.5% annually. 

Research funding has also continued to grow, albeit at different rates in different countries at 

different times. Thus, the scholarly journal literature has expanded considerably. 

Since the mid-1990s, scholarly publishers have invested in new technologies that have 

dramatically increased the utility of published resources, increasing productivity, expanding 

availability, accelerating the speed of delivery and enhancing discoverability, thus increasing the 

impact of scientific progress. 

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Library Statistics 

The Association of Research Libraries publishes an annual report of library statistics. The ARL 

Library Statistics far 2009 - 2010 (see 

http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/aristats/index.shtml), has a chart tracking changes in 

serials unit costs, expenditures and number of purchases at ARL universities for the period 1990 

-2010: 

• During that 20-year period, according to statistics published annually by Library Journal, 

the average serial's list price has increased by 613%. 

• During that same period, the overall increase in libraries' total spending on serials has 

increased by far less: 327%. 

• This is despite a large increase in the number of serials purchased, which grew by 315%. 

• The price paid per serial has actually declined in the past decade and is now close to the 

level it was 20 years ago. 

• The reason for this dynamic is attributable to the migration from print to digital content 

where publishers have been able to offer various bundles or clusters of journals at little 

or no extra cost through licenses with consortia or state-wide university systems. 

The migration from print to digital content has resulted in a many order of magnitude increase 

in access to scholarly journals by the research community, and a concomitant steep drop in 

price for an individual to access an article. According to the forthcoming "AAP Industry 

Statistics Report for Professional and Scholarly Journals for 2010", the research community 

downloaded over 1 billion articles from a collection of approximately 5800 journals published 

by 26 scholarly publishers. The collection of journals examined in this study represented more 

than 60% of the citations reported in the scholarly journal literature for 2010. The summation 

of reported revenues linked to electronic institutional circulation from these publishers for 

2010 was approximately $2.7 billion; therefore, the average cost per download by a researcher 

was on the order of $2.70 per article download. This cost is in the same range that a group of 

40 scholarly publishers is offering to the public for access to journal articles through a new 

article rental service, which allows individuals to "rent" single articles for periods of days for a 

nominal fee, similar to Apple's iTunes TM service. 

2. If open access journals and repositories continue to grow and provide more 

competition to existing journals, does this eliminate any pricing concerns since 

subscribers will have more choices on where to spend their resources? 

The fundamental challenge for AlP and many other publishers is how to generate sufficient 

revenue to cover the costs of filtering worthy articles, adding value to an author's manuscript 

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94 

once accepted for publication and producing a journal. These costs include: editorial office 

software, peer review management, plagiarism detection, editorial board management, online 

hosting platform, copy editing, creating files for online distribution and delivery to mobile 

devices, marketing, referencing, and long-term archiving. This must be accomplished while 

generating marginal net revenue allowing us to re-invest in future publishing technologies and 

innovations to best serve our stakeholders (subscribers, authors, scholars, editors, peer 

reviewers, funding agencies). 

There are currently two main business models supporting publication of peer-reviewed journals 

and the global dissemination of scholarly articles. The predominant business model is based on 

subscription charges or access fees generally paid for by academic library customers. This is also 

known as "reader pays". The other model is termed open access or "author pays," in which the 

author pays an article processing charge, allowing the article to be made available at no charge 

to readers. 

For AlP, the predominant model is a "reader pays" with subscription prices and license fees set 

in a way that provides customers around the world with a superior value at cost effective 

prices. Of note, AlP scores extremely well on the "price per article" metric on 

journalprices.com. AlP also offers tiered pricing for its journal subscriptions where customers 

are categorized by their level of research activity and amount of usage. We also track other 

value for other metrics such as cost per download. The trend in increased usage far exceeds 

price increases. AlP has also enhanced access through consortia licenses, resulting in almost 

5,000 institutions around the world having access to AlP journals. In the print world less than 10 

years ago, this figure was approximately half ofthis number. 

AlP has responded positively and creatively to open access initiatives in a number of ways. 

Firstly, AlP's copyright policy allows authors to deposit a version oftheir paper on the author's 

and employer's web pages and on e-print repositories, such as institutional and subject 

repositories. Secondly, AlP's "Author Select" program allows any author to make their article 

open access by paying an article processing charge. In this model, the author retains copyright 

under a Creative Commons license. Thirdly, AlP is developing a program of open access 

journals. With this range of products and services to the author, reader and library 

communities, AlP will continue to provide a sustainable future to strengthen the scholarly 

research community. 

Regarding pricing, whatever business models are adopted, the challenge for AlP will be to 

continue to offer a competitive service that is highly valued - whether it is reader pays or 

author pays. The free market demands that we take these steps. As a medium-sized, non-profit 

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95 

learned society-AlP publishes 15 leading journals, three of which are published in partnership 

with other organizations; the institute also publishes on behalf of five smaller Member 

Societies-AlP is well aware of mounting competition from large commercial publishers 

throughout the world that are publishing hundreds and in some cases thousands of journals. 

Peer review 

3. It appears that the majority of peer reviewers donate their time. If the peer review 

process is valuable, would AlP support a mandatory payment for peer reviewers paid 

for by the researcher or the funding entity? 

I am not aware of any peer reviewers for scholarly journal articles being reimbursed for their 

effort expended in reviewing articles. Academics consider this effort to be a standard practice 

in the profession. Scholars donate their time to review scholarly articles in their fields of study 

with the assumption that their peers will reciprocate. This system of volunteer, anonymous 

reviewing has been in place since external peer review became the norm for many journals 

(expanding beyond editorial review) since early in the last century. I believe establishing a 

payment system for peer reviewers would distort and overly complicate the present system 

which is generally working very well. 

Even though publishers do not pay for a peer reviewer's time, a significant cost expended by 

publishers in producing journal articles is managing the peer-review system. AlP is mediumsized publisher, publishing 15 journals with approximately 15,000 articles published each year 

in our suite of journals. Approximately 20% of our expenses are for the administrative tasks of 

managing 30- 40,000 reviewers for this number of articles; this includes stipends for 130 

academics that serve as full time or part time editors. 

Centralized database vs. a distributed model 

4. With open access archives spreading in number, please share your thoughts for a 

distributed model in which there are numerous databases versus a centralized model 

like PUBMED? Which access model would AlP prefer? 

Although a centralized data platform would appear to have some obvious advantages regarding 

simplicity of operation, the use of a centralized, government-controlled platform for a large 

body of scholarly content has significant downsides. This would almost certainly increase 

federal expenditures. 

4 
96 

A centralized, governmental approach would almost certainly increase federal expenditures 

and likely draw funding away from research budgets. It also discourages innovation by driving 

traffic away from private market innovators, including publishers, thus minimizing scientific and 

commercial opportunities. 

An important role for government in this arena would be to drive and fund the development of 

interoperability standards (the ability for separate systems to work together) and promote the 

widespread use of such standards. AlP supports the recommendation of the 2010 Scholarly 

Publishing Roundtable Report that states that government policies should be guided by the 

need to foster interoperability and encourages" ... additional multi agency programs 

supporting research and development to expand interoperability capacity and to develop and 

promote additional interoperability practices and standards." 

It is AlP's position that stewardship of publications should be the collaborative responsibility of 

the publishing, library, and research communities. Federal involvement in the long-term 

stewardship of publications is best addressed as part of the copyright system and through the 

library of Congress digital preservation initiatives primarily as a promoter of standards and as 

one of many stewards of specific data platforms that need to be linked across public and 

private boundaries. Please see page 8 of AlP's prior written testimony for the March 29, 2012 

hearing for additional detail. 

Notably, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) 

has recently reported recommendations supporting a distributed archive. OSTI is currently 

engaged in pilot projects with several scholarly publishers to make the citations of DOE-funded 

journal articles available in the search and retrieval applications operated by OSTI. OSTI is 

improving DOE's ability to demonstrate its research results by collaborating with journal 

publishers. This involves engaging with publishers to identify and broaden access to the journal 

articles reporting on research funded by DOE. AlP applauds this effort as an exemplary way for 

government to engage in a win-win collaboration. Through these efforts, OSTI reports they 

have gained insight on how projects like these might be structured to achieve success. In part, 

OSTI recommends that citations should include abstracts and hyperlinks to a landing page for 

the publisher's version of the article. In addition, DOE notes that an algorithm should be 

developed in concert between the journal publisher and OSTI to identify DOE-funded articles in 

the publishers' data stores and an automated process should be supported to allow for 

processing new articles submitted to the publisher on a weekly or monthly basis. 
97 

Piracy concerns 

5. PUBMED Central blocks mass downloading for a variety of reasons, one of which is 

journal piracy from countries like China. How serious is this issue for AlP and are 

there examples of mass downloading attempts at other online journals and archives? 

Piracy is a major concern for all creators of intellectual property, including the scholarly 

publishers. AlP relies on national and international enforcement of copyright and anti-piracy 

laws. PUBMED Central's broad, world-wide access enables piracy in countries where 

intellectual property protection is poor, thus damaging an important US export market. Indeed, 

according to the Association of American Publishers submission to the OSTP Request for 

Information on public access, one negative consequence of the NIH policy on public access is a 

global increase in the piracy of US scientific and scholarly articles. 

Estimates are that annual losses from this theft cost US publishers and scientific societies up to 

$100 million annually. (See page 10 and references therein: 

http:Uwww.pspcentral.org!documents!OSTPRFI-Schola rlyPubl ications-fi n a 11-10-2012. pdf). 

This sort of theft and piracy also works against AlP's and other publishers' efforts to develop 

viable business relationships with Chinese libraries, relationships that adhere to international 

principles for protecting intellectual property. Thus, not only does piracy sap revenue from US 

publishers, it also jeopardizes future revenue growth as the US tries to expand its markets into 

China. 

Embargo period 

6. How important is the embargo period to the economic health of journals and to the 

public interests as a whole? Is the importance of an embargo period likely to decline 

over time? What is the ideal embargo period, and is it the same duration for all 

disciplines? 

AlP believes that a uniform access policy or mandate for scholarly publications would be an 

ineffective approach. An overarching government-wide policy or embargo period would fail to 

accommodate such key factors as the specific needs of any given agency, the rapidly changing 

nature of scholarly publishing, and the unique considerations of the various fields of science 

and the journals that serve them. Economic impacts will vary depending upon whether the 

journals are published weekly, monthly or quarterly. 

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98 

Publishing is AlP's primary source of revenue, supporting our publishing and outreach activities 

that serve the broader physics community and the general public. Over 40% of our 

subscriptions are from non-research institutions. We believe that these institutions would 

strongly consider cancelling their subscriptions if access to articles was mandated within a short 

time period of time [such as the 6 month period as currently stated in the FRPAA bills (S. 2096; 

H.R. 4044) before both Houses of Congress]. Government mandates in this area could impose a 

significant threat to our business model and sustainability. 

AlP analyzed related industry data using the "cited half-life" metric as a relative indicator for 

how long journal titles within scientific categories are being accessed and cited, thus reflecting 

economic viability. Based on the evidence related to AlP journals and to journals covering 

physics and related sciences, significant economic threats to our enterprise would arise with 

the assignment of minimum embargo periods. In looking at a sample of several physics, related 

topics, and AlP journals within those categories, AlP found that physics journals have a longer 

cited half-life compared to some other scientific disciplines. Furthermore, AlP journals have a 

longer cited half-life than their respective physics category averages. This analysis is presented 

on page 15 of the first attachment to AlP's written testimony for the March 29, 2012 hearing. 

Instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all solution with a fixed embargo length for all articles that 

have some component of federal funding or introducing a complicated scheme for varying 

embargo lengths (as necessary to address field-specific conditions), AlP proposes a simpler 

system. This system allows government to enhance public access in a way that is not only 

effective, efficient, and sustainable, but also maintains the economic viability of the US 

scientific enterprise into the future. 

To summarize the key components, AlP and a number of our colleagues from the scientific 

publishing community propose the following plan to improve public access to the results of 

pUblically funded research: 

1. Scholarly publishers as a group propose modifications to their author submission software so 

that all journal articles written would include funding agency information along with the 

standard metadata that is already being deposited in CrossRef (crossref.org) and other standard 

bibliographic databases. This new metadata, which specifically tags the funding agency(s) 

responsible for the research leading to the journal article, would be deposited in the Cross Ref 

database. The CrossRef database has been developed and maintained by this nonprofit 

consortium for the past 12 years and now contains the metadata for more than SO million 

scholarly articles and related content. Funding agencies can procure a license to this database 

at modest cost, and many have already done so. Such a license provides access to the article 

metadata, including the critical article identifier (the 001 - digital object identifier). This pilot 

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99 

project, known as FundRef, was introduced on May 2, 2012 with first results expected by the 

end of this year. More information available here in the press release: 

http://www.crossref.org/01company/pr/news050212.html. 

2. With the successful implementation of FundRef, agencies would have access to the standard 

meta data from published articles. By displaying this information on agency websites, visitorsranging from the research community to the general public-could follow the link [enabled 

through the 001] to the publisher's platform where article abstracts are freely available and the 

Versions of Record (VoR) (maintained by the publishers) are available through a variety of 

access mechanisms, including innovative rental access models, which give the public instant 

access for a modest fee. More than 40 scholarly publishers are currently testing this access 

mechanism. 

3. Scholarly publishers have proposed and initiated pilot projects with funding agencies to link 

agency research reports and related content on agency sites to publisher content tagged with 

the same funding information, thus expanding interoperability between agency and publisher 

databases and access to the linked content. 

OSTP Report 

7. The OSTP report required by the COMPETES Act was recently released. Do you agree 

with the contents of the report and do you feel it addresses your concerns? Were any 

issues of interest to you not addressed? What specific next steps should OSTP or the 

Committee take in regards to the issue? 

The OSTP report on public access that was released at the end of March was responding to the 

one of the COMPETES Bill Section 103 statutes that required OSTP to report on progress on 

their oversight role for interagency planning one year after the passage of the COMPETES bill. 

OSTP did a significant amount of work on this complex topic by commissioning and managing 

two interagency panels as described in the report (one on access to data and one on 

publications). The primary content in the report refers to developments on public access from 

three agencies: NIH, which already implemented a public access policy for publications in 2008 

by Congressional mandate, and from DOE and NSF, which began development of public access 

policy as a result of the COMPETES statutes. 

The report notes that OSTP will continue to monitor progress at the agency level and leaves 

open the possibility for additional reports downstream as agencies make further progress on 

policy development and implementation. From my standpoint, I am pleased that the focus has 

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100 

shifted to DOE and NSF, which can be models for how the other agencies respond to the related 

issues of access, interoperability standards and archiving. 

As a scientific publisher I am pleased to note the following two quotations from the OSTP 

report: 

" ... agencies and public commenters are cognizant of the essential role that publishers and the 

peer review system play in advancing the scientific enterprise. The PASP therefore set out to 

explore what steps could be taken to expand public access while preserving the value that 

publishers provide to the scientific enterprise, creating new business opportunities, and 

maximizing the economic and societal benefits of the Federal investment in research and the 

resulting publications." 

"It should also be stressed that it is the intention of the Administration to continue a robust 

dialog with the private sector and the public to ensure that policies developed will benefit the 

public interest and to maintain a level playing field for all interested parties." 

Impact of Access Policies 

8. Do existing public access policies have an adverse impact upon federal grant 

applications? Does the quality of proposals suffer because researchers do not want to 

make their work or data public? Understanding that researchers typically want to 

communicate their findings to the greatest possible audience, is this even a problem? 

AlP cannot comment on the quality of proposals since agencies receive federal grant proposals 

in confidence and protect the often proprietary nature of their contents. We note that any 

reported impacts on the type and level of grant applications under the existing NIH public 

access policy should not be extrapolated to other fields or agencies. Medical research as 

funded by NIH is markedly different in type, scope and duration from physical science research 

funded by DOE or NSF, for example. 

We can say with confidence that researchers typically can and do communicate their research 

results as widely as possible. Publishing scientific journals is the primary means by which 

scientists communicate advances in research to the scientific community. However, journal 

articles are only one way in which research results are communicated and the scientific 

community is only one audience. In addition to scholarly journals, scientists also use meetings, 

lectures, reports, media, and public outreach materials and events to communicate research 

results. Audiences range from the general pUblic to commercial interests. Also, a variety of 

organizations, including universities, government agencies, the media, patient advocate groups 

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101 

and scientific societies such as AlP try to communicate results of scientific research to these 

varied audiences. 

Data Access 

9. Should all information and data associated with federal research published by journals 

be made public? Is this reasonable or even possible? 

AlP's highest goal is to achieve the widest possible dissemination ofthe research results it 

publishes, including any pertinent associated data and context information. As a scholarly 

publisher, AlP believes that better access and reuse of original research data are to be 

encouraged at all levels and among all stakeholders. AlP believes that data resulting directly 

from federally funded scientific research should be made freely available in a sustainable 

manner, and that this is best accomplished through appropriate policies that leverage publicprivate collaboration. One way to achieve this balance is for the government to adopt a 

sensible, flexible, and cautious approach to drafting public access policies. This approach 

should engage all concerned parties, including federal agencies, scientists, university 

administrators, librarians, publishers, and the public. Consistent with the recognition of 

economic realities, it is AlP's pOSition that government agencies should develop their public 

access policies through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders, including 

researchers and publishers. 

For example, NSF is considering a proposal from AAS and AlP to fund a pilot project to link databehind-the-figures and tables with scholarly publications. The pilot involves a reasonably small 

community: astronomy/astrophysics and plasma physics. Significant issues to be examined 

include author participation, peer review, and selection of appropriate datasets. 

10. Aside from the publishing industry and scientific society concerns regarding greater 

public access, does providing greater access impact the quality of scientific research in 

anyway? 

AlP believes that it would be in the best interest of the United States and its government, as 

well as in the best interest of all other stakeholders, to strike a balance between public access 

and sustenance of the scholarly publishing industry because of the impact and value it brings to 

the progress of science and its contributions to American society and economy. Such a balance 

can be achieved based on shared principles such as the importance of peer review, the 

recognition of economic realities through adaptable and viable publishing business models, the 

need to ensure secure archiving and preservation of scholarly information, and the desirability 

10 
102 

of broad access. As referred to in my oral testimony, ali parties in this debate agree that 

enhanced public access is a good thing. It's good for the economy and it is good for science. 

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103 

Responses by Mr. Elliot Maxwell 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight 

Ouestions for the Record 

"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests" 

Thursday, March 29, 2012 

9:30 a.m. 11 :30 a.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

Mr. Elliot Maxwell, 

Project Director, Digital Connection Council, Committee on Economic Development 

Ouestions submitted by Dr. Paul Broun, Chairman Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight 

Pricing Issues 

I. Concerns have been raised that the prices of many scholarly journals continue to increase 

sharply. Do you agree with these concerns? Since Congress usually avoids becoming 

involved in pricing debates, why should this be an issue for Congress? 

ANSWER: I am concerned about prices because of their effect on access, particularly to 

reports on research funded by taxpayers. To the extent that prices rise, fewer institutions 

and individuals will be able to afford subscriptions, and therefore fewer individuals will 

benefit from the research funded by taxpayers thus, reducing the return on taxpayer 

investment in the research. Policies such as the NIH public access policy address this 

problem of diminishing access without having Congress take any particular position on 

journal pricing. Continued price increases suggest that the proprietary journals retain 

pricing power and are not suffering from the existing public access policies in the United 

States or elsewhere. Ifthey were losing substantial subscription revenue at least some of 

them might be experimenting with lower prices to encourage increased subscriptions. 

As the NIH Director has pointed out, subscription prices overall have continued to go 

up .. 

2. If open access journals and repositories continue to grow and provide more competition 

to existing journals, does this eliminate any pricing concerns since subscribers will have 

more choices on where to spend their resources? 

ANSWER: I believe that the scientific publishing market will be heterogeneous with 

open access and proprietary journals competing for articles and readers and with 

increased numbers of repositories providing access to some but not all articles. Increased 

competition among models is a helpful development, but no substitute for a policy that 

ensures that government -funded research is available to everyone in order to maximize 
104 

the return on taxpayer investment in research, promote innovation, increase progress in 

science, and provide the resulting economic benefits. 

Peer review 

3. Although federal taxpayers may have funded the research behind a submitted manuscript, 

they have not automatically paid the costs of editing and peer review unless a journal 

charges for that service. How would the debate over public access change if thc federal 

government either: 

• Required that the submitted manuscript, not the peer reviewed version, be made 

available to the public immediately, or 

• Required that journals be compensated for all reasonably related peer reviewing 

costs? 

ANSWER: A balanced policy should use the peer review process to identify 

manuscripts worthy of publication, thereby providing some quality control on 

what is held out as good science. One should be careful about assuming that there 

are large costs associated with coordinating such peer review. The results of 

research funded by taxpayers is provided by researchers to the publishers without 

compensation because researchers want their work to be broadly available and 

are competing to have their work made available by the most prestigious outlet. 

Academics provide their time and effort to review journal submissions, provide 

editing, and serve on editorial advisory boards, usually without any compensation, 

because of their bclief in the importance of service to their disciplines. There are 

indeed coordinating costs but these have declined as the Intemet is used for the 

coordination. 

Proprietary publishers should have a reasonable opportunity to recover these 

coordination costs during embargo periods, but embargo periods should be kept as 

short as possible so as not to unduly delay the achievement of the powerful 

benefits that increased access provide for science, innovation, and economic 

growth. Alternatively these coordinating costs can be paid for by the authors as is 

the case with the growing number of open access journals or by other means. 

Competition between the various publishing models should provide some check 

on the reasonableness of the costs of peer review. 

Centralized database vs a distributed model 

4. With open access archives spreading in number, please share your thoughts for a 

distributed model in which there are numerous databases, versus a centralized model like 

PUBMED? 

ANSWER: I do not have a strong opinion about whether to prefer a centralized modcl 

like PUBMED versus a decentralized model. This is a question that OSTP can help 
105 

answer. I do believe that the PUBMED model is working and provides an existing 

vehicle that could be reasonably and quickly modified, if necessary, to accommodate 

other taxpayer funded research. Just as I favor open access to get the greatest return on 

NIH funded research, I would favor getting the greatest return on the investment in 

PUBMED absent a showing that other models are superior. 

If a case is made for a distributed model, I would very strongly support requirements for 

interoperability. r would suggest requiring that all databases be easily searchable from a 

centralized access point. This would reduce the burden on users who would not have to 

visit multiple sites and make it easier to publicize the means by which potential readers 

could obtain access to taxpayer funded research. I would also be very cautious about 

attempts by any individual database operator to discriminate or act anti -competitively 

with respect to any other database, That behavior could present a substantial problem that 

is already apparent in efforts on the Internet by site managers to make their sites "sticky" 

and to discourage users from leaving the site to visit others. Allowing anti competitive 

discrimination or unnecessary restrictions on access would defeat the purpose of 

increasing access to taxpayer funded research. 

Negative effects of open access 

5. Your testimony indicates that those opposed to greater public access should bear the 

burden of showing the appropriate delay for works being made available. Why shouldn't 

federal agencies and Congress wait to change the current model until there is strong 

evidence that there won't be harm to publishers, many of whom have been working to 

improve science in their filed for decades? Your study alone does not mean there is 

strong evidence. 

6. ANSWER. One of the aims of my study was to look carefully at each and every claim 

made by publishers of harm caused by the NIH public access policy. I believe that the 

report demonstrated, based on all of the public testimony and regulatory submissions by 

the proprietary publishers, that they have not provided any convincing evidence of harm. 

While forecasting great harm in their public policy files, publishers' comments to 

financial analysts downplay any negative effects and suggest that the publishers will 

grow their profits in the future. The report also looked at a wide range of studies which 

demonstrated the value of greater access for science, innovation and economic growth. 

I believe that publishers bear the burden of demonstrating harm given that they are the 

ones in possession of the data about the impact of increased public access policies on 

their businesses. That proprietary data is not available to me or to other disinterested 

scholars. Given the strong case for greater access, if publishers, ask policymakers to 

delay greater access and to withhold the benefits to science and to the economy, then 
106 

publishers should be asked to provide the data that would demonstrate that the harm 

resulting from increased access outweighs the benefits. This is something that they have 

not yet done in any public setting .. If they can provide substantial evidence that the 

harm to science, innovation, and the economy from increased public access outweigh 

the benefits, I would change my view on what the public policy should be. But it is hann 

to science and the society, not harm to any particular publisher or group of publishers that 

is the test. No particular publisher or group of publishers should be protected from the 

disruptive effects of the Internet if the value for society of increased public access 

outweighs the as of yet undemonstrated harm to society and the scientific enterprise. 

OSTP Report 

7. The OSTP report required by the COMPETES Act was recently released. Do you agree 

with the contents of the report and do you feel it addresses your concerns? Were any 

issues of interest to you not addressed? What specific next steps should OSTP or the 

Committee take in regards to the issue? 

ANSWER. I see the OSTP report as more of a status update than a deep analysis of the 

questions regarding public access. I would encourage the committee to support the 

extension of the NIH public access policy to other federally funded research and to ask 

OSTP to move expeditiously to address the issues required to obtain the benefits of 

increased public access as quickly as possible. 

Impact of Access Policies 

8. Do existing public access policies have an adverse impact upon federal grant 

applications? Does the quality of proposals suffer because researchers do not want to 

make their work or data public? Understanding that researchers typically want to 

communicate their findings to the greatest possible audience, is this even a problem? 

ANSWER: I have not seen any evidence that the quality of proposals has suffered 

because of concerns about public access; the competition for funding is so intense that 

researchers know they must put forward their best efforts in order to obtain financial 

support. 

But the existing restrictions on access to data, protocols, computer programs etc. and the 

existing restrictions on reuse need to be the subject of intense review by policymakers as 

soon as possible. These restrictions are preventing scientists from making the fullest use 

of research funded by taxpayers. It is these restrictions which are the most important for 

the working scientists; they have been overlooked in the struggles over increased public 

access to published works. 

Data Access 

9. Should all information and data associated with federal research published by journals be 

made public? Is this reasonable or even possible? 
107 

ANSWER: I think there are a number of issues that need to be addressed regarding 

access to underlying data, protocols, computer programs etc. but we should begin to 

address these as soon as possible with the goal of increasing access. I think it unlikely 

that ALL information and data will be made public. Privacy protections, for example, 

would be likely to require that the identities of participants in studies be stripped out. But 

much of what is withheld today can and should be made available after a careful review 

of the issues and the development of appropriate guidelines. 

10. Aside from the publishing industry and scientific society concerns regarding open access, 

what are the science research implications of providing full open access? I believe that in 

the years to come we will look back at today's arguments over published articles as 

relatively simple. The much more difficult questions about increasing access to 

underlying data, protocols, and computer programs will be seen as the next frontier for 

policymakers--and the area where policymakers can benefit scientific researchers and the 

scientific enterprise the most. Full open access may not be the most desirable result 

given issues of security, data integrity, and privacy among others, but the direction in 

which science is moving is toward greater openness. Policymakers should work with the 

various stakeholders to determine the limits on openness, if any. Science thrives on 

openness and policy should limit that openness only when there are substantial societal 

costs that outweigh the benefits. 
108 

Responses by Dr. Crispin Taylor 

June 6, 2012 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

Subcommittee ou Investigations & Oversight 

Responses to Ouestions for the Record 

Page I of 12 

"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests" 

Thursday, March 29, 2012 

9:30 a.m. - II :30 a.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

Submitted by Dr. Crispin Taylor, 

Executive Director, American Society of Plant Biologists 

June 6, 2012 

Responses to questions submitted by Dr. Paul Broun. Chainnan Subcommittee on Investigations 

& Oversight 

The responses below reflect my own opinions, as well as the perspectives of the American 

Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), where I am CEO, and the Association of Leamed and 

Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), a trade association of non-profit publishers to which 

ASPB belongs. I respectfully refer committee members to my written testimony, submitted on 

March 27,2012, for additional infonnation regarding ASPB and ALPSP. 

Pricing Issues 

1. Concerns have been raised that the prices of many scholarly journals continue to 

increase sharply. Do you agree with these concerns? If so, what are the reasons for 

these price increases and how does this impact the exchange of new scientific 

knowledge? 

No, I do not agree with concerns that prices for many scholarly journals continue to increase 

sharply. Indeed, recent data published by the Association of Research Libraries 1 indicate 

that although list prices for journals are rising, per journal costs to libraries have fallen back 

to where they were 20 years ago. This is despite the fact that publishers are now producing 

multiple versions of journals - whether in print, online, or optimized for e-readers - and 

investing substantially in ensuring that the electronic journal versions are ever more useful 

and interconnected than they were previously. At the same time, more people in more places 

arc accessing more infonnation via scholarly journals than has ever been the case before, so 

the substantial investments that publishers have made over the past 15 to 20 years to bring 

, http://publications.arl.org/ARL-Statistics-2009-2010/ 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
109 

June 6, 2012 Page 2 of12 

their journals online have enormously improved the capacity for the exchange of new 

scientific knowledge - and the economic benefits that derive from that knowledge. Indeed, 

ASPB currently serves over 2,000 research institutions, and every person affiliated with these 

institutions has instant access to ASPB journal content online. 

Furthermore, although costs are obviously important to the purchasers (which, in the case of 

subscription model journals, are most often libraries), it is important to also consider the 

value of a product to its end users. It is an axiomatic business rule that higher value products 

can attract higher prices. And it is also clear that, in any given scholarly discipline, there is a 

hierarchy of journals, with those valued most highly by a scholarly community publishing the 

most important and innovative research findings. 

As governments around the world continue to invest substantially in fundamental and applied 

research - and as that research is published in scholarly journals - the total number of 

journals has risen steadily over the past several decades. With the rising number of journals 

and the fact that by far the most prevalent business model in scholarly publishing remains the 

subscription model it is undoubtedly true that libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to 

pay for all the journals their patrons wish to read. But in my opinion that concern has more to 

do with constrained or shrinking library budgets than it does with the prices of individual 

journals. 

2. {f open access journals and repositories continue to grow and provide more competition 

to existing journals, does this eliminate any pricing concerns since subscribers will have 

more choices on where to spend their resources? 

The complexity currently inherent in the scholarly publishing ecosystem makes this a 

difficult question to answer succinctly. Many journals that, like ASPB's, operate primarily 

under a subscription access business model, nevertheless offer opportunities for authors to 

make their articles freely available immediately upon publication. (And many make all of 

their content freely available after an embargo period that meets their business needs and the 

needs of their reader communities.) Meanwhile, some journals (a minority) are operating 

under an "author pays" business model, under which all research articles are made Open 

Access upon publication. And other modcls abound. In all instances, publishers host the 

content on their own journal platforms (or those leased from third parties) these are the 

formal, definitive, Version of Record (VoR) articles. 

Repositories whether organized around an institution, a field of study, or, in the case of 

PubMed Central (PMC), a government agency - operate in parallel to the formal scholarly 

publishing marketplace. As such, they either duplicate work done by publishers - in my 

opinion an unnecessary and wasteful practice in a time of tight budgets everywhere - and/or 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
110 

June 6, 2012 Page 3 ofl2 

provide access to article versions that are not definitive. This is important, because studies 

have demonstrated that researchers prefer to access the publisher-created and hosted VoR 

from a peer-reviewed journal as the authoritative, definitive version, over versions in subject 

or institutional repositories2

, 

3

• 

So, the growth of open access journals and repositories does not eliminate pricing concerns 

(which, as I pointed out earlier, are in my opinion largely misplaced). However, unfunded 

mandates requiring publishers to release the value-added works they produce at an arhitrarily 

defined time point following publication interfere with publishers' abilities to support 

themselves, compete and experiment with business models, or create and improve products 

and services that could benefit to the publisher and the consumer. Three recent reports 

provide evidence that these concerns are valid. A study of journal publishing in the 

humanities and social sciences, fields in which scholarly articles are known to have a very 

long she1f1ive, concluded that the imposition of embargo periods like those in biomedicine 

community could threaten the sustainability ofthesejournals4

• A 2006 Publishing Research 

Consortium (PRC) report concluded librarians would likcly canccl scicntific journal 

subscriptions if content is available for free, even with embargo periods5

, a finding that has 

been substantially reinforced by a more recent survey conducted by PRC on behalf of ALPSP 

and the UK Publishers Association6

• 

The bottom line is that a fair market has to find its own business models; they cannot be 

imposed. Although governments, as I stated in my testimony, have a legitimate interest in the 

scholarly publishing domain, that interest is most appropriately promulgated via policies and 

approaches that foster non-disruptive change. Disruptive change (perhaps inadvertently 

triggered by a government tipping the scales too suddenly toward one business model or 

another) is likely to be far more harmful to scholarly communication in the short to medium 

term than a steady evolution in the direction of further increased public access. 

Neither ALPSP nor ASPB is in favor of mandated deposit to centralized open repositories. In 

addition to significant concerns about long-term sustainability and piracy, open repositories 

have deleterious effects on the publishing model; for example, NIH does not currently 

provide publishers with full, detailed usage statistics from PMC, which means publishers are 

unable to supply libraries with the complete picture with regard to their institution's use of a 

wide range of journals. Such usage data are crucial in determining renewals and while this 

2 http://www.pee!)Jroject.eu/reports/D4.2 PEER Behavioural Research - Final Report 

3 http://www.publishingresearch.netiprojects.htm Research Publication Characteristics and Their Relative Values 

4 The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations," Report on a 

study funded by a Planning Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (February 2009), available at: 

htlj;l:/Iwww.nhalliance.orglbm-doc/hssreport.pdf 

5 Publishing Research Consortium Report "Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition" 

(July 2006). Accessible at htlj;l:llwww.publishingrescarch.org.uk/doeuments/SeIFarchiving report.pdf 

6 htlj;l:/lwww.alpsp.org/Ebusincss/AboutALPSP I ALPSPStatements/Statementdetai Is.aspx'llD=407 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
111 

June 6, 2012 Page 4 of 12 

situation persists, librarians are making cancellation decisions on the basis of incomplete 

usage data. 

Peer review 

3. It appears that the majority of peer reviewers donate their time. If the peer review 

process is valuable, shouldn't their time be paid for, either by the researcher or funding 

entity? 

Peer review by scholarly journals is a multifaceted process. Ultimately, the decision on 

whether or not to publish a manuscript is made by a member of the journal's editorial board. 

These individuals are frequently provided modest honoraria by publishers, in recognition of 

their expertise and the time and energy that they put into their decisions. Chief editors are the 

journals' ultimate arbiters; they can also be compensated or reimbursed by publishers. 

(ASPB provides its journal editors-in-chiefwith both an honorarium and an institutional 

allowance that they use to offset the time that leading our journals takes away from their own 

research programs.) Publishers also incur additional expenses for managing the peer review 

process (which typically involves both staff and an online infrastructure) and for holding 

periodic meetings of editorial boards at which journal policies, practices, and scholarly 

directions are discussed and determined. 

All that said, it is indeed the case that each manuscript deemed worthy of review by an editor 

is evaluated by peer scholars (typically two or three per manuscript) who usually are not paid 

for their contributions. However, providing service as a peer reviewer - whether to journals, 

to agencies that are evaluating the merits of submitted grant applications, or to a professional 

organization that is judging students' poster presentations at a scientific meeting - has long 

been a central tenet of academic/scholarly culture. The peer reviewer'S reward comes in the 

form offormal acknowledgments of their service from journals and other entities - and the 

opportunity to list that peer review service on a CV as both a contribution and an implicit 

recognition of their expertise and the respect held for their opinions. 

It is my assessment that the current system is operating very well. Furthermore cfforts to 

compensate peer reviewers would be complicated by the fact that the journal pecr review 

process is set up to evaluate manuscripts no matter where they come from; so it is frequently 

the case that an American peer reviewer is asked to assess a manuscript submitted by a 

Japanese scholar - and vice versa. It would be impractical- and, in my opinion, inimical to 

scholarly discourse - to endeavor to restrict peer review on the basis of which country a 

manuscript came from or a reviewer was based in. 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
112 

June 6,2012 Page 5 of 12 

4. Althoughfederal taxpayers may havefunded the research behind a submitted manuscript, 

they have not automatically paid the costs of editing and peer review unless a journal 

charges for that service. Would the debate over open access be less divisive if the federal 

government either: 

• Required that the submitted manuscript, not the peer reviewed version, be made 

available to the public immediately, or 

• Required that journals be compensated for all reasonably related peer reviewing 

costs? 

Regarding a requirement that the submitted manuscript, not the peer-reviewed version, be 

made publicly available, such an approach might suffice for public access, although with 

the important caveat that it might actually put a brake on innovations derived from 

research if it impedes scholars from submitting manuscripts that include patentable 

information until after those patents had been applied for or awarded. However, requiring 

that the submitted manuscript be made available is not necessary to support scholarship 

and research, where, as noted above, data show that more scholars already have greater 

access to more scholarly information than ever before. Moreover, as also noted above, 

there are data indicated that scholars strongly prefer to have access to the definitive VoR, 

which typically resides on the publisher's site. 

A far more appropriate - and immediately available - option would be to make grantees' 

reports available to the public via the granting agencies' websites. Some already make 

such research reports available (e.g. the DoE Information Bridge\ but others do not. 

Making all such reports freely available would solve the "public access" issue. Moreover, 

by cooperating with publishers - as they already are through the experimental FundRef 

program8 - agencies would be able to link grantec reports directly to any peer reviewed 

journal articles that are derived from the funding, regardless of the access mechanism via 

which those articles are available. 

Regarding a requirement that journals be compensated for peer review costs, such an 

approach would not account for the many other investments that publishers make in post 

acceptance processing, production, hosting, distribution, long term preservation and 

archiving, and so on. It also, as previously mentioned, would not take account of the fact 

that most scholarly journals review and publish articles from all over the world, not just 

the US. So although the US Government's interests re public access may pertain 

specifically to those articles reporting on research funded by US government agencies, 

the larger interest re scholarship and using research findings as a basis for economic 

developmcnt and growth would be much more effectively served by developing 

7 htt:p:llwww.osti.govlbridgel 

8 http://www.crossreforg/fundretl 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
113 

June 6,2012 Page 6 of 12 

policies and approaches that move toward making the entire corpus of the scholarly 

literature available to all. 

Centralized database vs. a distributed model 

5. With open access archives spreading in number, please share your thoughts for a 

distributed model in which there are numerous databases versus a centralized model like 

PUBMED? The Internet itselfis a distributed network by design. Shouldn't the same be 

true for how federally funded research is made available to the public. using search 

engines to find what is of interest? 

Yes, the distributed nature of the Internet is a fundamental feature of its design and 

operation, and there is no sound reason to require that federally funded research be made 

available via centralized repositories, like PMC. In an interconnected age, with current 

and ever-improving technology, centralization is not required and moreover, requires 

unnecessary duplication of effort at considerable expense. Indeed the report from the 

Scholarly Publishing Roundtable (on which I served) in January 20109 recommended 

decentralization to achieve the interoperability needed to "enhance the impact of the 

scholarly literature and ignite the generation of new knowledge". 

So, it is easier, quicker, and cheaper to continue to support the distributed model than to 

invest in centralized databases that not only duplicate effort but can also undermine 

publishers' capacity to innovate and secure returns on their investments. The definitive 

VoR exists on publisher websites, and that is where we should be aiming to point peoplc 

interested in finding research articles. 

The capacity for search engines to discover distributed information is enormously 

enhanced by the development and utilization of standard approaches and metadata. 

Publishers have gone to considerable lengths in developing tools to ensure 

interoperability between different access systems. For example the Digital Object 

Identifier (DOl 10) system, to provide persistent identification of digital objects, the 

CrossRef II organization and its various ongoing projects aimed at connecting users with 

primary research content and the Open Research and Contributor ID (ORClDI2) 

initiative, to solve author name ambiguity in scholarly communications and latterly 

resolving institutional naming ambiguity. 

9 http://www.aau.edulW orkAreaIDQwnloadAsset.aspx?id~ I 0044 

10 http://www.doi.org 

''http://www.crossref:org 

12 http://orcid.org 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
114 

June 6, 2012 Page 7 of 12 

Publishers have also collaborated with librarians and database providers to establish 

COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources 1\ which has 

produced an international set of standards and protocols governing the recording and 

exchange of online usage data. These standards enable publishers to better understand the 

usage patterns of their digital content and for librarians to track the usage of their digital 

collections. A variety ofInternet search engines, abstracting services, and other tools do 

an excellent job of ensuring the discoverability of research, and innovations and 

advancements of these and other tools continue to be developed. 

An important role for government in this arena would be to drive and fund the 

development of interoperability standards that would facilitate and enable ever richer 

connections among journal articles and other types of scholarly information available 

online and promote the widespread adoption and use of such standards. Indeed, ASPB 

supports the recommcndation of the Scholarly Roundtable Report that states that 

government polieies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability and 

encourage "additional multiagency programs supporting research and development to 

expand interoperability capacity and to develop and promote additional interoperabiJity 

practices and standards." The Scholarly Roundtable Report further notes that the NSF, 

DOE, and other agencies provide important funding for the development of 

interoperability capacities through their cyberinfrastructure programs. 

Piracy concerns 

6. PUBMED Central blocks mass downloadingfor a variety of reasons, one of which is 

journal piracy from countries like China. How serious is this issue and are there 

examples of mass downloading attempts at other online journals and archives? 

Journal content and manuscripts hosted by PMC are universally available for free, 

including in countries, like China, in which intellectual property protection is relatively 

poor. So, ASPB and ALPSP are concerned about this matter. 

That concern is heightened by PMC data showing that more than half of all its users are 

from outside the US. This repository is therefore likely to have an adverse impact on the 

export market for the US publishing industry which, in total, employs around 50,000 

people and contributes roughly $3.5 billion to the US balance of trade. 

But digital piracy is a more general concern. A recent article in the ALPSP Journal 

Learned Publishingl4 provides some examples of the challenges in controlling online 

piracy and protecting the copyrights in the works for the authors and publishers. The 

1Jhttp://www.projectcounter,org/ 

l'Ed McCoyd, "Online piracy of publishers' content: a primer," Learned Puhlishing, 2012 (25); 21-28, 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
115 

June 6, 2012 Page 8 of 12 

Association of American Publishers reported data to the US Department of Commerce in 

December 2010 on piracy monitoring of 10 publishers IS. The publishers detected more 

than 299,000 online files infringed copyrighted products within a 24 month period. The 

seriousness of piracy needs to be further explored so that the content that publishers make 

available is properly represented and not resold without permission. This is a concern 

regardless of whether the content is freely available or not. 

That said, the need for archiving digital information has been recognized by publishers, 

librarians, funders and researchers alike. Collaborative projects already exist to ensure 

the long term preservation of scholarly information through initiatives such as Portico 16, 

LOCKSS 17, and CLOCKSS 18. 

The embargo period 

7. Mr. Dylla 's testimony stated that there should be different embargo models for different 

fields. Do you agree with his testimony? How important is the embargo period to the 

economic health of journals and to the public interests as a whole? Is the importance of 

an embargo period likely to decline over time? What is the ideal embargo period, and is 

it the same duration for all disciplines? 

Regarding different embargo periods for different fields, yes, I completely agree with Dr. 

Dylla's testimony that these are needed. 

The importance of embargo periods can be assessed by examining trends in article usage 

and impact over time; the journal half-life forms a useful measure of these trends in any 

given discipline. For example, the American Physiological Society reports journal halflife from 4.3 to over 10 years 19. The quarterly journals of the American Anthropological 

Association also have a cited half-life of over 10 years, and 90% of downloads occur 12 

months after the date of publication. In mathematics papers published in 2009, 50% of 

citations were found to be to papers originally published before 1999, with 20% of 

citations to papers published before 198520 . 

"Comments of the Association of American Publishers in response to the Department of Commerce 'Inquiry on 

Copyright Policy, Creativity and lonovation in the Internet Economy'. Association of American Publishers, 2010, p. 

II. Available at http://publishers.org/ attachments/docsllissuesllpiracy-aap%,20response%20to%20I1Oi%2012-10-

2010.pdf 

16 http://www,portico.org/digital-preservatiQn/ 

17 http://www.lockss.org/locksslHomc 

18 http://www.ciockss.orglclockss/Home 

19 http://www.the-aps.org/publications/ioumals/info/impactfactors.htm 

20 hltp:l/www.msri.orvlattachments/workshops/587IMSRlfinaireport.pdf Donald E McClure (2011) Dynamics of 

Mathematics Journals, 2000 to 2009 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
116 

June 6, 2012 Page 9 of 12 

So, embargo periods are crucial for subscription-based publishers, because they provide 

the temporal window during which those publishers monetize their products. As they 

exist now, with the exception ofthe NIH requirement regarding PMC, they are not 

arbitrary but have been calibrated by publishers seeking to balance both their business 

needs and obligations and the needs of the communities they serve. On top of this, many 

publishers have free access policies that allow authors to choose whether to makc their 

articles freely available immediately upon publication. Publishers are also innovating and 

adopting other models, such as inexpensive pay-per-view and article rental models that 

are intended to provide access outside of subscriptions at low or very low cost. 

It seems unlikely to me that the importance of the embargo period will decline with time, 

unless it happens in the context of a collaborative, sustainable, and orderly evolution of 

journal business models toward further increased public access. 

8. How important is the embargo period to the economic health of ASPB, other journals, 

and to the public interests as a whole? Is the importance of an embargo period likely to 

decline over time? 

The embargo period is vitally important to ASPB; our usage data indicate that over half 

of our journal Plant Physiology's online usage - and, thus, half of the journal's potential 

value, comes after 12 months. Nevertheless, because we have found that we are able to 

sustain subscriptions with a l2-month embargo window, we have opted for many years to 

make the entire content of both ASPB journals free 12 months after publication. 

ASPB is exploring novel ways in which to raise revenues to that will sustain the society'S 

efforts to provide ongoing support for plant biology and plant biologists. To the extent 

that those efforts are successful and allow us to adjust our journals' business model, it is 

conceivable that the importance of a 12-month embargo period may decline over time. 

But this is only feasible if government policies regarding public access continue to allow 

ASPB the space and time it needs to innovate. Mandates that shorten embargo times 

beyond that which ASPS has determined is sustainable will close the window on ASPB's 

capacity to innovate. Put simply, shortened embargo periods would undcrmine the 

society'S capacity to invest for the future. 

OSTP Report 

9. The OSTP report required by the COMPETES Act was recently released. Do you agree 

with the contents of the report and do you feel it addresses your concerns? Were any 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
117 

June 6, 2012 Page 10 of 12 

issues o/interest to you not addressed? What specific next steps should OSTP or the 

Committee take in regards to the issue? 

In general I found the OSTP report to helpful in its descriptions ofOSTP and NTSC 

activitics and in its call for continued analysis and engagement. I particularly welcome 

the following passage: 

[Responses to the RFI] have indicated a strong support jor broad public access to 

scholarly publications resultingfromfederally-supported research. Similarly, agencies 

and public commenters are cognizant of the essential role that publishers and the peer 

review system play in advancing the scientific enterprise. The P ASP therefore set out to 

explore what steps could be taken to expand public access while preserving the value that 

publishers provide to the scientific enterprise, creating new business opportunities, and 

maximizing the economic and societal benefits of the Federal investment in research and 

the resulting publications. 21 

The report also emphasizes the need for US government agencies to engage with similar 

organizations in other countries - a point that resonates strongly with me and echoes 

another of the recommendations of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable and it points 

toward a continued collaborative process involving all stakeholders in developing and 

coordinating any agency policies, as envisioned in the America COMPETES 

Reauthorization Act. In particular, the report highlights productive public-private 

partnerships underway between the DOE and the NSF and publishers. 

On the other hand, the report also makes some assertions regarding the current policy 

regarding mandated deposit of articles in PMC that I consider to be either questionable or 

inaccurate. For example, I would question the assertion that "NIH awards are used to 

produce peer-reviewed papers,,22, because scholarly papers, per se, are not produced with 

award funding and award funding does not cover the added value that publishers 

provide. Furthermore, although the statement that "This policy, and its subsequentjine 

tuning, has led to a dramatic increase in the number a/NIH papers posted to PMC,23 

may indeed be true, the fact of the matter is that this "dramatic increase" has come 

largely as a result of publishers voluntarily submitting author manuscripts on the authors' 

behalf. Without such cooperation from publishers, the number of deposits would be much 

lower. 

21 Page 5, from the section describing the "Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications." 

22 Page 11 

23 Page 12 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
118 

June 6, 2012 Page 11 of 12 

Impact of Access Policies 

IO. Do existing public access policies have an adverse impact upon federal grant 

applications? Does the quality of proposals suffer because researchers do not want to 

make their work or data public? Understanding that researchers typically want to 

communicate their findings to the greatest possible audience, is this even a problem? 

No; in my opinion, public access policies have no adverse impact on federal grant 

applications. There is no problem regarding access to the scholarly literature in academia; 

indeed, as I stated previously, publisher and librarian policies over the past 15-20 years have 

rendered enormously more material available to many more scholars than was ever available 

before journals started publishing on the Internet. A recent survey from the Publishing 

Research Consortium found that 97% of researchers in North America have very or fairly 

easy access to research journals24 • This study also demonstrated that North America enjoys 

one of the best 'access to information' versus 'importance of that information', profiles of 

any of the regions investigated. 

Furthermore, grant applications and the material in them are confidcutial unless/until the 

grants are funded, and researchers routinely include a mix of unpublished and published data 

and information in their applications. The published data, of course, have been vetted via 

peer review and publication, and the journal in which they have appeared is one important 

measure of their quality and impact. Unpublished data included in grant applications are 

assessed by peer reviewers identified by the agencies to review those applications in the 

context of the published data. To put it another way, unlike journal articles, grant 

applications are not a medium for communicating research findings to a broad community; 

they are a (confidcutial) vehicle for proposing novel research work that builds on prior work. 

Data Access 

II. Should all information and data associated with foderal research published by journals 

be made public? Is this reasonable or even possible? 

This is already happening; it is exactly what publishers (and those that run databases) do, 

and the entire content of all the journals that I know of is publicly available. But making 

something public is not the same as making it freely available, whether immediately or 

after some period of time (i.e., a publisher-determined embargo period). So, in many 

instances, there is a fee associated with accessing publicly available journal articles, 

especially shortly after they are first published (or "made public"). 

24 httO"I/WWW.DUblishinqresearch.netio[Qiects.htm Access vs. Importance 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
119 

June 6, 2012 Page 12 of 12 

It is indeed feasible to work toward a goal of immediate free public access to the 

scholarly literature in some fields. But such an objective carmot be sustainably or 

reasonably accomplished via mandates - particularly if they are unfunded or unilateral; it 

will require international collaboration among publishers, agencies, and other 

stakeholders, as well as the development of robust standards for interoperability and 

exploration of new business models in controlled environments. 

12. Aside from the publishing industry and scientific society concerns regarding open access, 

what are the science research implications of providing full open access? 

Tt is my opinion that the business and practice of scholarly publishing have changed enormously 

over the past two decades. Publishers are innovating furiously, developing novel products and 

services that take advantage of the Internet, and exploring new business models. As a result, the 

scholarly publishing milieu is already richly supporting and greatly benefiting - research and 

discovery. 

Presuming that scholarly publishing is allowed sufficient space to continue to innovate in a 

sustainable manner, I am confident that the industry will further support research and discovery. 

But I continue to believe that that it would be in the best interest of the US Government and all 

other stakeholders to strike a balance between public access and the needs and interests of the 

scholarly publishing industry because of the positive impact and value the latter brings to the 

progress of science and its contributions to American society and the national economy. Such a 

balance can be achieved based on shared principles, including the importance of peer review, the 

recognition of economic realities, the exploration and adoption of adaptable and viable publishing 

business models, the need to ensure secure long-term archiving and preservation of scholarly 

information, the increasing need to establish connections among disparate information sources 

and repositories online, and the desirability of broad access. 

One way to achieve this balance is for government to adopt a sensible, flexible, and cautious 

approach to drafting and revising public access policies-~·an approach that engages all concerned 

parties, including federal agencies, scientists, university administrators, librarians, publishers, and 

the public. Indeed, it is ASPB's position that government agencies should develop flexible public 

access policies through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders, including 

researchers and publishers. Policies should be guided by the urgent need to foster global 

interoperability of information across multiple databases and platforms. Agencies' efforts and 

resources could then be directed toward facilitating cyberinfrastructure and collaborative 

programs with and among agencies and other stakeholders to develop robust standards for the 

structure offull text and metadata, navigation tools, and other applications to achieve 

interoperability across the scholarly literature and other information sources. 

Response to subcommittee questions from Crispin Taylor 
120 

Responses by Mr. Stuart Shieber 

"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication 

Interests" 

Thursday, March 29, 2012 

9:30 a.m. - 11 :30 a.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

Mr. Stuart Shieber, 

Director, Office for Scholarly Communications, Harvard University 

Ouestions submitted by Dr. Paul Broun. Chainnan. Subcommittee on Investigations & 

Oversight 

Pricing Issues 

1. If open access journals and repositories continue to grow and provide more 

competition to existingjournals, does this eliminate any pricing concerns since 

subscribers will have more choices on where to spend their resources? 

No, waiting on open-access journals and repositories to grow does not eliminate pricing 

concerns. The issue of choice alluded to is a chimera. Any given article is published only 

in a single journal. Therefore, from the point of view of readers, journals are not 

economic substitutes that compete for readers' resources, since a reader cannot tum to a 

"competing" journal to read the same article. Rather, they are economic complements. So 

providing more journals, even open-access ones, does not add competition to a market 

that is structured as the journals market is. 

Compounding this problem of the natural monopoly that inheres in the subscription 

journals market, the market is also subject to a moral hazard, since the readers of the 

content (the researchers) are not the purchasers ofthe content (the libraries). This leads to 

a market dysfunction that publishers can leverage to continue the hyperinflation of 

journal prices. Again, the moral hazard insulates subscription journals from any real 

competition from open-access journals, because from the point of view of individual 

readers, access to both open-access journal articles and articles from subscribed journals 

appears to be free. 

For these reasons, the actual competition between subscription and open-access journals 

is not on the reader side, but on the author side. Both kinds of journals do compete for 
121 

submissions from scholar-authors. From the point of view of authors, different journals 

are economic substitutes. But here again, subscription journals have an inherent 

advantage. To an author, subscription journals are free to publish in, because the 

government through its funding agencies, together with the universities, support the 

subscription journals by underwriting the subscription fees that the publishers charge. But 

many open-access journals, since they eschew subscription fees, recoup revenue by 

author-side publication fees. An author in choosing a journal must pay this fee to publish 

in the open-access journal, but typically does not pay a fee to publish in the subscription 

journal. The open-access publication fee thus serves as a direct disincentive for authors to 

publish in open-access journals. 

The solution to this anti-competitive situation is for the government to explicitly support 

open-access journals in the same way that it supports subscription journals: Government 

funding agencies should provide incremental funds to grantees to pay reasonable openaccess publication fees for articles that they fund. Doing so would eliminate the 

disincentive for authors to publish in open-access journals, placing open-access and 

subscription journals on a level playing field, and opening up the market to true 

competition on the author side. 

Because the underlying economics of subscription publishing means that there can be no 

competitive market on the reader side, the role of the federal government there is to at 

least make sure that the reading public can have some level of access to the research 

literature. Policies like the NIH Public Access Policy achieve this. The pending FRP AA 

bill would go a long way toward maximizing such public access. 

Peer review 

2. It appears that the majority of peer reviewers donate their time. If the peer review 

process is valuable. shouldn't their time be paidfor? 

Not only do the majority of peer reviewers donate their time, essentially all peer 

reviewers donate their time. As academics, we view our participation in the peer review 

process as editors and reviewers as part of our responsibility to the social structure of 

scientific research. 

No one is calling for peer reviewers to be paid for their time. The substantial additional 
122 

funds required to pay peer reviewers for their time at market rates would merely 

exacerbate the current unaffordability of the journal ecology. Academics have established 

a social nonn that participation in the peer review system is expected as part of our 

contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Eliminating this social-nonn-based 

system in favor of a market nonn is likely to be counterproductive. Research in 

behavioral economics has convincingly shown that when systems move from social 

nonns to market nonns, expectations ofthe participants can change abruptly and 

counterproductively. In the case of reviewing, it may be impossible to provide sufficient 

payment to academics to convince them to participate merely as a market function. 

Fortunately, so far at least, academics have been willing to provide these reviewing and 

editorial services pro bono. However, reviewers are not likely to have infinite patience 

with a social nonn that, because of dysfunctions in the market, is providing excessive 

profits to publishers, while not providing them with access to the literature that they 

voluntarily write, review, and edit. The solution is not to pay the reviewers. The solution 

is to adjust the scholarly publishing market so that it does not exhibit the market 

dysfunctions. Moving to an open-access journal publishing system would achieve this 

adjustment. 

The government could take two actions that would have the effect of supporting the 

open-access journal publishing system. First, government funding agencies could require 

that any articles deriving from government-funded research be made publicly available. 

The FRP AA legislation would achieve this to a large extent, though the embargo period 

is still problematic. Second, government funding agencies could provide incremental 

funds to grantees to underwrite reasonable publication fees for articles in open-access 

journals (just as funders and universities now provide the subscription fees on behalf of 

readers ofthe subscription journals). 

3. Although federal taxpayers may have funded the research behind a submitted 

manuscript, they have not automatically paid the costs of editing and peer review unless 

ajournal charges for that service. Would the debate over open access be less divisive if 

the federal government either: 

• Required that the submitted manuscript, not the peer reviewed version, be 

made available to the public immediately, or 

• Required that journals be compensatedfor all reasonably related peer 
123 

reviewing costs? 

The premise underlying the question is that federal taxpayers via government funding 

agencies fund the research that underlies an article, but do not fund its editing, peer 

review, or other publisher services. 

But sUbscription journal publishers are compensated for these services. They are 

compensated in the form of subscription revenues, revenues which are made possible 

because of the monopoly rights of copyright voluntarily given to the publisher by the 

author. The publisher, having been given the copyright, then monetizes that copyright, 

using its ability to limit access to only those willing and able to pay. The average value of 

that copyright monetization, according to the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, is about 

$5,000 per article. Given that subscription publishers are already compensated by the 

funded authors through monetization of copyright, asking for further compensation 

constitutes double-dipping. 

The requirement to provide public access to an author's final manuscript to the public 

does not affect this monetization of copyright. As demonstrated in detail in the 2012 

report "The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the 

Results?" by Elliott Maxwell for the Committee for Economic Development, "There is 

no persuasive evidence that increased access threatens the sustainability of traditional 

subscription-supported journals, or their ability to fund rigorous peer review." Thus, 

public access does not change the fact that subscription journal publishers are already 

compensated for their services. 

The subscription fees that compensate the publishers for their services are paid 

overwhelmingly by academic research libraries, under subvention by overhead charges 

on federal grants. It is the universities and funding agencies who thus pay for the 

publisher services. 

For publishers that do not use the subscription revenue model, so-called open-access 

publishers, this argument does not hold. Open-access publishers do not receive revenue 

by monetizing copyright. For those publishers, funding agencies should, and are willing 

to, underwrite open-access publication fees. Since these fees are the only revenue for the 

journal, there is no double-dipping going on. 
124 

However, the mechanisms by which most funding agencies underwrite open-access 

publication fees are not ideal. (There are notable exceptions, in particular, the Well come 

Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.) 

I. Funding agencies require that authors pre-budget for these fees, despite the fact 

that it is impossible to predict the required amount of open-access publication 

fees. 

2. Funding agencies require that grantees use direct grant funds for publication fees, 

forcing grantees to trade off using grant funds for publication fees against using 

grant funds for other research uses, and so disincentivizing publication in openaccess journals. 

3. Funding agencies limit underwriting of the fees to the duration of the grant, even 

though publication ofthe articles based on grant research often comes after the 

grant has ended. 

All of these problems can be easily corrected, however, by funding agencies making 

available a small amount of incremental funds to grantees for the purpose of underwriting 

reasonable open-access publication fees. These funds would be available during the grant 

period and for a limited period thereafter. I've described this proposal in detail at 

<http://hvrd.me/sLhk3H>. 

The embargo period 

4. Mr. DyUa's testimony states that there should be different embargo modelsfor 

d!fferentfields. How important is the embargo period to the economic health o.fjournals 

and to the public interests as a whole? Is the importance of an embargo period likely to 

decline over time? What is the ideal embargo period, and is it the same duration for all 

disciplines? 

The ideal embargo period is zero. Open-access journals provide this embargo period by 

definition, as well as providing a host of other advantages over subscription journals, and 

can do so in economically sustainable ways. Major open-access journal publishers -

Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing - are already operating 

in the black, demonstrating that embargoless publishing is sustainable. 

Furthermore, as has been repeatedly noted, there is no evidence that shorter embargo 
125 

periods have any adverse effect on subscription journal revenues. The issue is covered 

exhaustively in the 2012 report "The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will 

Control Access to the Results?" by Elliott Maxwell for the Committee for Economic 

Development, which concludes that "There is no persuasive evidence that increased 

access threatens the sustainability of traditional sUbscription-supported journals, or their 

ability to fund rigorous peer review." 

The Harvard response to the White House RFI on "Public Access to Peer-Reviewed 

Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research" states that "if 

publishers believe that short embargo periods would harm them, they should release data 

showing it. Researchers, research institutions, and taxpayers cannot be expected to prove 

the negative, or to prove the harmlessness of short embargoes. Until there is data to show 

harm, we must act in the public interest and provide early or immediate public access to 

publicly funded research. If publishers provide data showing substantive harm, then it 

may become appropriate to consider what kind of compromise with the public interest 

might be justified." 

5. How important is the embargo period to the economic health of journals and to the 

public interest as a whole? Is the importance of an embargo period likely to decline over 

time? 

It is important to answer this question based on evidence, and not brute assertions. 

Crucially, there is no evidence that short embargo periods cause any damage to the 

economic health of journals let alone to the public interest as a whole. (To the contrary, 

the public interest is of course advanced by eliminating embargo periods.) The burden of 

proof is on publishers to provide concrete, verifiable evidence of damage before 

compromising the public's interest in having access to the research results that they have 

funded. All existing evidence is to the contrary. Many subscription journals with zerolength embargoes are operating at a profit. Moreover, open-access journals, which have 

no embargo by their very definition, are being operated profitably at the highest levels of 

quality. 

OSTPReport 

6. The OSTP report required by the COMPETES Act was recently released. Do you 
126 

agree with the contents of the report and do you feel it addresses your concerns? Were 

any issues of interest to you not addressed? What specific next steps should OSTP or the 

Committee take in regards to the issue? 

To my knowledge, the only report issued by OSTP pursuant to the COMPETES Act was 

the March 2012 report "Interagency Public Access Coordination: A Report to Congress 

on the Coordination of Policies Related to the Dissemination and Long-term Stewardship 

ofthe Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research". This report provides information 

about the process that the Interagency Public Access Committee (IP AC, established 

pursuant to Section 103(a) of the COMPETES Act) has been undertaking, but does not 

provide concrete conclusions, because "The NSTC groups are continuing to consider the 

public comments received from the RFIs and how they should be incorporated into the 

objectives required by ACRA. Once they have finalized their decisions, the objectives of 

all three groups will be combined and presented to the CoS." Until the IPAC submits its 

conclusions, any comment on their sufficiency would be premature. 

However, given (as IPAC states) that "The Administration has long recognized the 

importance of improving the management of and access to the results of federally funded 

scientific research including digital data and peer-reviewed publications" and that the 

responses to the OSTP's RFIs "showed broad support for increasing public access to 

scientific publications" (page 1), the OSTP should not delay in stating its support for 

current legislation such as FRP AA, which is intended to achieve exactly this aim. 

Impact of Access Policies 

7. Do existing public access policies have an adverse impact upon federal grant 

applications? Does the quality of proposals suffer because researchers do not want to 

make their work or data public? Understanding that researchers typically want to 

communicate their findings to the greatest possible audience, is this even a problem? 

I know of no empirical evidence showing that existing public access policies have had an 

adverse impact upon federal grant applications, and cannot imagine how such a result 

would arise. Public access policies provide more access to articles, access that can be 

used to improve not only the quality of scientific research, but also, the quality of 
127 

research proposals and the thoroughness and accuracy of proposal reviews. 

Indeed, the opposite may well be true: Lack of open access could be harming federal 

grant applications. Proposal quality may suffer because many articles are effectively 

inaccessible to proposal developers, many of whom do not fall within the scope of 

subscription access to all of the cited and pertinent literature for a given proposal. Thus, a 

public access policy could have the effect of improving the quality of grant applications, 

since researchers developing proposals would have access to a broader range of the 

pertinent literature. Similarly, first principles suggest that the availability of research 

results should make review of proposals more systematic and complete, and therefore 

more accurate and effective. 

The utility of open access to improve the writing and vetting of grant proposals is but one 

example of the advantages of open access in general in advancing not only science 

research but also public knowledge and the federal economy as well. 

Data Access 

8. Should all information and data associated with federal research published by 

journals be made public? Is this reasonable or even possible? 

Ideally, all information and data associated with federal research published by journals 

would be made public. However, the incentives for open access to data are different from 

the incentives for open access to articles. Researchers have no incentive to keep articles 

secret, hence open access to articles is easier to achieve. Researchers may wish to exploit 

data that has been painstakingly collected for a period of time to draw further research 

conclusions. They may therefore perceive an incentive to keep such data secret. For this 

reason, the two efforts - to make articles and data accessible - should be dealt with 

separately. Crucially, there is no reason to delay policies to provide open access to 

articles while developing more speculative policies on open access to data. 

With this caveat in mind, work on appropriate methods for opening up access to data to 

enable the replication of research conclusions and further analysis is an important goal to 

augment the progress of science, and should be rigorously pursued. Such methods will 

have to trade off the advantages of openness with the incentives for private exploitation 

that inhere in the issue of data accessibility. 
128 

9. Aside from the publishing industry and scientific society concerns regarding open 

access, what are the science research implications of providing full open access? 

The only implications of providing full open access - absent the financial interests of a 

small set of scholarly publishers - are positive, not only for science research but for 

public knowledge and for the federal economy as well. 

Open access benefits science research by making the fruits of research available to all 

who wish to build upon it, not just the few who happen to fall within the scope of a 

subscription to the particular journal in which an article is published. No researcher on 

earth has access to all ofthe pertinent scholarly journals - not even at my own 

institution, Harvard, which holds the largest academic library in the world. All 

researchers thus benefit from open access to scholarly articles. 

Open access benefits public knowledge by placing scholarly articles in the hands ofthe 

taxpayers who underwrote that research, and in the hands of the press and other 

nongovernmental organizations who can interpret that research on behalf of the public. 

Open access benefits the economy by supporting the access needs of businesses, small 

and large alike, who rely on the latest scientific results to generate new products, 

methods, and treatments. John Houghton's modeling of the effect of broader public 

access to federally funded research shows that the benefits to the US economy come to 

the billions of dollars and are eight times the costs (John Houghton, Economic and Social 

Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs, July 2010). 

Even if it were true (contrary to the empirical evidence) that broad public access to the 

science literature could harm the financial interests of some publishers, the goal of the 

federal investment in scientific research is not to maintain the financial interests ofthat 

particular multinational industry, but to maximize the financial interests of the country as 

a whole. Thus, the federal government should promulgate policies that provide full open 

access. 
129 

Responses by Mr. Scott Plutchak 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight 

Ouestions for the Record 

"Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests" 

Thursday, March 29,2012 

9:30 a.m. - II :30 a.m. 

2318 Rayburn House Office Building 

Mr. Scott Plutchak, 

Director, Lister Hill Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham 

Ouestions submitted by Dr. Paul Broun Chairman, Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight 

Pricing Issues 

I. Concerns have been raised that the prices of many scholarly journals continue to increase 

sharply. Do you share these concerns? Since Congress usually avoids becoming involved 

in pricing debates, why should this be an issue for Congress? 

I do share these concerns. Since the costs of materials in the health sciences continue to increase 

at annual rates of roughly 7% to 8% and state budgets, in recent years, have tended to fluctuate 

between 6% cuts and 2% increases, it becomes impossible for us to maintain existing 

subscriptions and to add access to new journals. Thus, the ready access to scientific research that 

my students and faculty require continues to diminish. While I understand the reluctance of 

congress to get involved in pricing issues, the economics of scholarly publishing are unlike most 

other sectors ofthe economy. Because each journal title is unique, it is not possible to substitute 

one neurology journal for another neurology journal. Librarians have had very little success in 

ncgotiating with publishers to lower prices in response to increasingly constrained acquisitions 

budgets. Because of the importance to the public welfare of a robust and innovative 

infrastructure which is very dependent on ready access to the peer-reviewed literature, I believe 

that this is an area where the Congress could be justified in considering legislation that addressed 

pricing issues. 

2. What harms for your library and your students arise if you are not able to subscribe to all 

of the journals you would prefer to subscribe to? Is this just a matter of setting priorities 

of university budgets? 

At UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham), we have done extensive surveying, focus 

groups and interviews to examine the impact on our education and research missions of reduced 
130 

access to publications. The impact on undergraduate students is minor, since instructors can 

generally find substitute articles available if their first choice is unobtainable. It becomes more 

of a concern for graduate students and post-docs, particularly in the sciences. For example, a 

young post-doc in one of our focus groups said that often what she really just needs is to read the 

methods sections of five or six articles in the area of her research in order to help her refine here 

technique. If she has to make do with one or two, she risks using a method that is not as 

effective and that may result in a greater risk of her grant applications not being funded. Faculty 

find themselves in the position of trying to find an article on the same theme that may be "good 

enough," making do with the abstract of an article rather than reading the whole thing, or taking 

the time to request an article through interlibrary loan (virtually everyone that we talk to says that 

the 24 to 48 hours it takes to obtain an article through interlibrary loan is a significant 

impediment to their being able to work efficiently). Repeatedly we hear that when people can't 

get access to an article they'll contact the author or a colleague at another institution to get a 

copy. It is likely that in these cases, copyright or licensing tenns are being violated. 

The issue is certainly one of setting priorities for university budgets, although I wouldn't say it is 

"just" a matter, since there are always many competing priorities. For most health sciences 

libraries, materials costs increase 7% to 8% per year, and account for around 45% of the library's 

budget. In addition, new specialty journals arise on a regular basis (it was recently reported that 

global submission rates for academic journals are at their highest level in six years), which 

requires additional funding. With university budget increases at substantially lower levels than 

that, an institution that tried to prioritize library funding above all else would be on an endless 

slope, draining resources each year from those other priorities. Until pricing increases overall 

can be brought more in line with average increases in university budgets overall, it will not be 

possible for higher education institutions to prioritize library collections above all of the other 

essentials of a modern university. 

3. If open access journals and repositories continue to grow and provide more competition 

to existing journals, does this eliminate any pricing concerns since subscribers will have 

more choices on where to spend their resources? 

This is a complex question. Whether or not a proliferation of open access journals would 

mitigate pricing concerns depends on how they are funded. If funded through the "author-pays" 

mechanism, they would either reduce grant funding available or require institutional funding - in 

either case this could lead to pressures on library budgets as institutional budgets are reallocated. 

What would really makc a difference is if the funding for OA journals, through whatever 

mechanism, turns out to increase annually at rates lower than the current increases in 

sUbscription journals. At this point, I don't think we have enough data to make accurate 

predictions. Most librarians that I know support OA because it will increase access to the 

literature, not because they think it will mitigate budget concerns. 
131 

Regarding repositories - the various institutional mandates (along with the NIH public access 

mandate) rely on a robust subscription journal market. If all of the relevant journals were OA to 

begin with, there'd be no need to deposit copies in repositories, but if the subscription journals 

go out of business, they won't any longer be facilitating peer review. So to the extent that 

repositories are useful, they won't mitigate pricing concerns. If they put journals out of business 

that will mitigate pricing concerns in the sense of there being fewer journals to buy, but then the 

repositories themselves will become useless unless other entities pick up the peer review 

facilitation responsibilities. 

Peer review 

4. Although federal taxpayers may have funded the research behind a submitted manuscript, 

they have not automatically paid the costs of editing and peer review unless a journal 

charges for that service. Would the debate over open access be less divisive if the federal 

government either: 

• Required that the submitted manuscript, not the peer reviewed version, be made 

available to the public immediately, or 

• Required that journals be compensated for all reasonably related peer reviewing 

costs? 

There have been some suggestions that if government agencies required public deposit of the 

various progress and final reports that are required of grantees, this would address the taxpayer 

interest in having access to the results offederally funded research. Very few OA supporters 

have shown signs of favoring this approach. I suspect the reaction would be similar to a 

requirement to make the submitted manuscript available. Despite the strong divisions overall on 

the OA question, there does seem to be a broad consensus that peer review provides an essential 

service in vetting the reports of funded research. 

On the other hand, a requirement that journals bc compensated would certainly be favorably 

received by the publishers and I think that many OA advocates would accept this as well, 

particularly if it resulted in access to the final version of record immediately upon publication. 

My personal view is that this would be highly desirable. It is not without consequences, 

however, particularly if the funding were accomplished with existing agency grant budgets. For 

example, commonly accepted estimates for the cost of publishing all of the NIH funded research 

articles in OA are about 1 % to 2% of the NIH extramural budget. While that seems small on a 

percentage basis, for an institution like UAB, 2% would be $4 to $5 million. This equates to 

something like 12 grants - a steady state loss of 3 or 4 new grants a year that wouldn't get 

funded. Given the importance of that first grant to a young researcher, it is likely that this would 

result in at least a couple of promising researchers a year leaving academia, or UAB needing to 
132 

come up with the funding to keep those individuals on board. So there would be some resistance 

to this from the research community. 

Centralized database vs a distributed model 

5. With open access archives spreading in number, please share your thoughts for a 

distributed model in which there are numerous databases versus a centralized model like 

PUBMED? The Internet itself is a distributed network by design. Shouldn't the same be 

true for how federally funded research is made available to the public, using search 

engines to find what is of interest? Would this impact your patrons in any way? 

I favor a distributed model. Many people who have gotten involved in the public access debates 

don't realize that PubMed Central was created long before the NIH policy was developed as a 

way for NLM to meet its statutory responsibility to preserve the biomedical literature. Since the 

NIH policy relied on author's manuscripts, some sort of repository was needed, so PMC was 

convenient. Creating additional PMC-like repositories at other agencies would add substantially 

to the costs. On the other hand, providing linkages to existing articles on publisher websites adds 

very little infrastructure cost. In order for this to be as efficient as possible, however, publishers 

must be encouraged to adhere to developing standards for how documents are structured. The 

NLM document type, for example, is increasingly being used by other organizations and would 

serve as a useful basis for such standards. 

The embargo period 

6. Mr. Dylla's testimony stated that there should be different embargo models for different 

fields. How important is the embargo period to the economic health of journals and to 

the public interests as a whole? Is the importance of an embargo period likely to decline 

over time? What is the ideal embargo period, and is it the same duration for all 

disciplines? 

The optimal embargo period is one that is set at such a point that most subscribers will be 

unwilling to wait for articles to become freely available and will thus maintain their 

subscriptions, but no longer than is necessary for that. That's the point in time where the public 

interest and the economic health of journals are in balance. For a cutting edge journal, published 

weekly, in a field where UAB has a strong research interest, the embargo period could be two 

weeks and I would probably still maintain a subscription. For an allied health journal in an area 

where we do not have a research interest and where the material is primarily of use to students, 

I'd probably cancel if there were a six-month embargo or perhaps even longer. For a quarterly 

journal in the social sciences where we don't have a strong research interest, I'd cancel if the 

embargo was a year. 
133 

The point is that there are quite a number of factors that play into whether or not a critical mass 

of institutions will cancel a particular journal and therefore there can be no such thing as an ideal 

embargo period. Supporters of FRP AA are fond of pointing to the apparent lack of evidence of 

mass cancellations caused by the NIH policy, but the journals that are highly affected by that are 

primarily biomedical research journals where the demand for the most current material is the 

highest. It is folly to conclude that extending the NIH policy to other agencies, with a shortened 

embargo, would have no negative impacts. 

Divergent opinions 

7. Your testimony noted your dislike with the two pieces of legislation out there. If 

Congress could start with a plain piece of paper, what federal policy or legislation would 

you support, or do you prefer no legislation at all? 

If additional legislation is called for, in my view it needs to balance several elements, all of 

which were addressed in the Roundtable report. It should not stipulate a specific embargo 

period, relying on negotiations among the stakeholders in the different disciplines to address an 

appropriate time frame; it should encourage development of standards for text- & data-mining 

purposes, and recommend a framework for encouraging collaborative policy making among all 

stakeholders. It should require OSTP to playa coordinating role, but should also set reasonable 

deadlines for when effective public access policies would be developed. Such legislation would 

be less than optimal for the strong OA advocates, and more intrusive than desired by the 

publishers most concerned about preserving unregulated control of their business practices - so it 

would probably be striking the right balance. 

OSTP Rs:port 

8. The OSTP report required by the COMPETES Act was recently released. Do you agree 

with the contents of the report and do you feel it addresses your concerns? Were any 

issues of interest to you not addressed? What specific next steps should OSTP or the 

Committee take in regards to the issue? 

The OSTP report certainly represents a step in the right direction, but there is still more that 

needs to be done. In crafting the report, OSTP relied on the responses to the RFIs. That was fine 

as far as it goes, but the deVelopment of robust and effective policies at the agency levels that 

will balance all of the appropriate concerns will require substantial additional engagement among 

all of the stakeholders. I recognize that there are hurdles involved in setting up appropriate 

working groups that can effectively engage in this kind of policy development, but I believe it is 

necessary to get past some of the impasse that we seem to still be left with. OSTP should be 

encouraged to develop a framework for such public/private cooperation in policy development at 

the agency level, with specific timeframes involved for delivering policy recommcndations. 
134 

Impact of Access Policies 

9. Do existing public access policies have an adverse impact upon federal grant 

applications? Does the quality of proposals suffer because researchers do not want to 

make their work or data public? Understanding that researchers typically want to 

communicate their findings to the greatest possible audience, is this even a problem? 

I do not believe that existing public access policies have an adverse impact on grant applications. 

Researchers do want to make their work public and in many cases they want to make their data 

public, once they've finished the work that the data is used for. Wider public access to peer 

reviewed journal articles (or versions thereof) should not present any problems for researchers 

appropriately protecting their data or their work before they are ready to make it public. 

Data Access 

10. Should all information and data associated with federal research published by journals be 

made public? Is this reasonable or even possible? 

This is a much more complicated problem than it appears at first glance. "All information and 

data" is potentially a huge amount, much of which is useless without substantial context and 

much of which, depending on the discipline (in computer science, for example) would be more 

useful ifit were re-generated when needed rather than stored and made public. A more useful 

way of framing the desired outcome might be that all information and data necessary for 

someone to replicate and validate the research published by journals should be made public. I do 

think that would be in the public interest. But defining exactly what that data is and how it 

should be stored and managed, and what are the complementary roles of government, research 

institutions and publishers is still not well understood, although there is much good work being 

done in this area. It is certainly one in which the federal government has a strong interest and an 

important role to play. 

11. Aside from the publishing industry and scientific society concerns regarding open access, 

what are the science research implications of providing full open access? 

Full open access, including the ability to text- and data-mine across standardized databases of 

journal articles has the potential to greatly increase the rate of discovery beyond what has been 

achieved with existing tools. In this sense, the passion of open access advocates is well-founded. 

The challenge is how to get there from here, without substantial negative consequences. Weare 

in a time of great upheaval and it is clear that sustaining the current scholarly publishing system 

should not be a goal of the government or of that industry itself - and most publishers recognize 

that. People in publishing are working very hard to take advantage of the new digital 

technologies to make more information more widely and effectively available than ever before. 

Open access is a part of that. But there are a lot of elements to this change and government 
135 

policy makers need to find that balance between reasonable caution and strong incentives to 

change in order to help the entire scholarly communication system deliver to the public what it 

has the potential to do. 

(137) 

Appendix II 

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL FOR THE RECORD
138 

LETTER SUBMITTED BY REPRESENTATIVE ZOE LOFGREN

An Open Letter to the U.s. Congress Signed by 52 Nobel Prize Winners 

March 28, 2012 

The Honorable Zoe Lofgren 

United States House of Representative 

1401 Longworth House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515 

Dear Representative Lofgren: 

As scientists and Nobel Laureates, we write to express our strong support for H.R. 

4004 and S. 2096, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). This broadly 

supported bi-partisan legislation would enhance access to federally funded, 

published research articles for scientists, physicians, health care workers, libraries, 

students, researchers, academic institutions, companies, and patients and 

consumers. 

Broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of 

knowledge. For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, 

publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible. Yet, too often, 

research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or members of the 

public. We believe Congress can and must act to ensure that all potential users have 

free and timely access on the Internet to peer-reviewed federal research 

findings. This ultimately magnifies the public benefits of research by promoting 

progress, enhancing economic growth, and improving the public welfare. 

As the pursuit of science is increasingly conducted in a digital world, we need 

policies that ensure that the opportunities the Internet presents for new research 

tools and techniques to be employed can be fully exploited. The removal of access 

barriers and the enabling of expanded use of research findings has the potential to 

dramatically transform how we approach issues of vital importance to the public, 

such as biomedicine, climate change, and energy research. As scientists, and as 

taxpayers too, we support FRPAA and urge its passage. 

The open availability of federally funded research for broad public use in open 

online archives is a crucial building block in laying a strong national foundation to 

support accelerated discovery and innovation. It encourages broader participation 

in the scientific process by providing equitable access to high-quality research 

results to researchers at higher education institutions of all kinds - from researchintensive universities to community colleges alike. It can empower more members 

of the public to become engaged in citizen science efforts in areas that pique their 

imagination. It will equip entrepreneurs and small business owners with the very 

latest research developments, allowing them to more effectively compete in the 

development of new technologies and innovations. Open availability of this 

research will expand the worldwide visibility of the research conducted in the U.S. 
139 

March 28, 2012 

20f4 

and increase the impact of our collective investment in research. 

FRPAA builds on established public access policies that have been adopted by 

government agencies in both the u.s. and abroad. The National Institutes of Health 

(NIH) have implemented a successful comprehensive public access policy, mandated 

through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008. All seven of the Research 

Councils in the United Kingdom have public access policies as does the Canadian 

Institutes of Health Research. This bill is also consistent with the growing number 

of institutional open-access policies that have been adopted at universities such as 

Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Kansas. 

The federal government funds over $60 billion in research annually. Research 

supported by the NIH, which accounts for approximately one-third of federally 

funded research, produces a more than 90,000 peer-reviewed journal articles each 

year. The return on our investment in scientific research is best realized with 

policies that promote access to the published results of that research. Passage of 

FRPAA will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly 

address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared 

knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation. As 

the undersigned Nobel Laureates, representing both U.S. interests and those of the 

rest of the scientific world, we ask you to co-sponsor and support the Federal 

Research Public Access Act. 

Signed by 52 Nobel Laureates 

U.S. Laureates: 

Name Category Prize Year 

Alexi Abrikosov Physics 2003 

Peter Agre Chemistry 2003 

Paul Berg Chemistry 1980 

J. Michael Bishop Medicine 1989 

Linda Buck Medicine 2004 

Martin Chalfie Chemistry 2008 

Elias Corey Chemistry 1990 

Robert F. Curl Jr. Chemistry 1996 

Johann Deisenhofer Chemistry 1988 

Andrew Z. Fire Medicine 2006 
140 

March 28, 2012 

30f4 

Edmond H. Fischer 

Riccardo Giaccardo 

Sheldon Glashow 

Roy Glauber 

Paul Greengard 

Roger Guillemin 

David Gross 

John L. Hall 

Leland H. Hartwell 

Dudley Herschbach 

Roald Hoffmann 

Louis Ignarro 

Wolfgang Ketterle 

Roger D. Kornberg 

Mario Molina 

Kary B. Mullis 

Arno Penzias 

H. David Politzer 

Stanley Prusiner 

Robert C. Richardson 

Richard J. Roberts 

Daniel Shechtman 

George Smith 

Hamilton Smith 

George Smoot 

Jack W. Szostak 

Joe Taylor 

James Watson 

Non-U.S. Laureates 

Name 

Medicine 1992 

Physics 2002 

Physics 1979 

Physics 2005 

Medicine 2000 

Medicine 1977 

Physics 2004 

Physics 2005 

Medicine 2001 

Chemistry 1986 

Chemistry 1981 

Medicine 1998 

Physics 2001 

Chemistry 2006 

Chemistry 1995 

Chemistry 1993 

Physics 1978 

Physics 2004 

Medicine 1997 

Physics 1996 

Medicine 2012 

Chemistry 2011 

Physics 2009 

Medicine 1978 

Physics 2006 

Medicine 2009 

Physics 1993 

Medicine 1962 

Category Prize Year 
141 

March 28, 2012 

40f4 

Aaron Ciechanover 

Richard Ernst 

Avram Hershko 

Tim Hunt 

Klaus von Klitzing 

Yuan T. Lee 

Jean-Marie Lehn 

Sir Peter Mansfield 

Hartmut Michel 

Erwin Neher 

John Polanyi 

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan 

Brian Schmidt 

Akira Suzuki 

Sir John Walker 

Chemistry 2004 

Chemistry 1991 

Chemistry 2004 

Medicine 2001 

Physics 1985 

Chemistry 1986 

Chemistry 1987 

Medicine 2003 

Chemistry 1988 

Medicine 1991 

Chemistry 1986 

Chemistry 2009 

Physics 2011 

Chemistry 2010 

Chemistry 1997 
142 

RESPONSE TO FEDERAL REGISTER NOTICE REQUEST FOR INFORMATION SUBMITTED BY

DR. H. FREDERICK DYLLA
143 

22 December 2011 

Page 2 of 16 

experts review submitted articles. Accepted articles are those that pass muster based on established 

criteria, including novelty and the substantial nature of the research findings. Managing peer review for 

approximately 30,000 articles submitted to AlP journals every year is a complex undertaking. It requires 

a large amount of sophisticated electronic resources, associated support personnel, a staff of 

professional editors-nearly all PhD physicists-and help from tens of thousands of referees. Each year 

AlP makes such necessary investments to fulfill its public nonprofit mission, generating an intellectual 

return through the dissemination of scientific research. 

Introduction 

AlP's highest goal is to achieve the widest possible dissemination of the research results it publishes, 

including any pertinent associated data and context information. Enabled by Internet technologies, AlP 

disseminates more information, more widely and more affordably, than ever before in its history, 

reaching more authors, subscribers, and users than ever before. This accomplishment requires heavy 

investments in technology and infrastructure (such as an online platform) and business-model 

innovation to deliver the option of free or low-cost access: open access, pay-per-view, or article rental, 

recognizing that the value of the final published article needs to be paid for to remain sustainable. 

AlP believes that it would be in the best interest of the United States and its government, as well as in 

the best interest of all other stakeholders, to strike a balance between public access and sustenance of 

the scholarly publishing industry because of the impact and value it brings to the progress of science and 

its contributions to American society and economy. Such a balance can be achieved based on shared 

principles such as the importance of peer review, the recognition of economic realities through 

adaptable and viable publishing business models, the need to ensure secure archiving and preservation 

of scholarly information, and the desirability of broad access. One way to achieve this balance is for 

government to adopt a sensible, flexible, and cautious approach to drafting public access policies-an 

approach that engages all concerned parties, including federal agencies, scientists, university 

administrators, librarians, publishers, and the public. 

Consistent with the recognition of economic realities, it is AlP's pOSition that government agenCies 

should develop their public access policies through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental 

stakeholders, including researchers and publishers. Any policies should be guided by the need to foster 

interoperability of information across multiple databases and platforms. Agencies' efforts then could be 

directed toward facilitating cyberinfrastructure and collaboration programs with and between agencies 

and the stakeholders to develop robust standards for the structure of full text and metadata, navigation 

tools, and other applications to achieve interoperability across the scholarly literature. More detail on 

this is provided later in the document. AlP believes that any scholarly publication access policy needs to 

be flexible to accommodate agency-specific needs and have the capacity to evolve in response to the 

rapidly changing nature of scholarly publishing. 

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AlP Responses to RFI Questions 

(1) Are there steps that agencies could take to grow the existing and new markets related to the 

access and analysis of peer-reviewed publications that result from federally funded scientific 

research? How can policies for archiving publications and making them publicaUy accessible be used 

to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific enterprise? What are the relative 

costs and benefits of such policies? What type of access to these publications is required to maximize 

US economic growth and improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise? 

According to trade association and other industry surveys of US publishers, both the nonprofit and 

commercial sectors serve a robust, innovative global market for the access and consumption of peerreviewed publications. Academic, corporate, and governmental research and education communities 

constitute primary segments of the market. Global revenue from scholarly journal publishing was 

estimated at $8.0 billion in 2008,'·2 with approximately $3 billion attributed to the US market. The 

enterprise employs approximately 110,000 people worldwide, with 30,000 in the United States. New 

publishers, journals, and business models either evolve or emerge constantly, signaling a healthy, 

competitive marketplace. 

The combination of investments in digital and online technology (by publishers as well as others) and 

the formation of library consortia (assisted by publishers in many cases) in the United States and around 

the world has accelerated and broadened access to peer-reviewed literature and dramatically decreased 

cost of such access. AlP serves approximately 2,000 research institutions, and every person affiliated 

with these institutions has instant access to AlP journal content. 

There is a growing presence and diversity of business models in the scholarly market. It is our belief that 

the government should support and encourage this diversity through its actions and policies through 

sustainable partnerships with publishers that would contribute to the US economy and maximize the 

productivity of the scientific enterprise. (For AlP's suggestions of partnerships and pilot projects that 

would meet mutually beneficial goals and conserve precious federal research funds for the agencies' 

primary mission of funding research, please see the responses to Questions 4 and 5. These 

recommendations for partnerships and pilot projects with federal agencies were developed in 

collaboration with a number of scientific publishers as we engaged over the last year in productive 

discussions with subject matter experts within the NSF and DOE, two US federal agencies that fund 

substantial research in the physical and biological sciences and engineering.) 

As stated in the 2010 Scholarly Publishing Roundtable report,3 many publishers have made the decision 

to move toward increasingly open structures and archives: as enabled by open access business models 

1 Cox, J. and L. Cox, Scholarly Publishing Practice: Academic lournals Publisher's Policies and Practices in Online 

Publishing, 3rd ed., AlPSP (2008), 

http://www .alpsp.org/ngen _pu blic/ artiel e.asp ?id=200&did=4 7 &aid=24 781&st=&oaid=-1. 

2 Outsell, "An Open Access Primer·Market Size and Trends" (2009), 

http://www.outseilinc.com/contact_ usl open_access _primer _ 2009. 

3 Report and Recommendations of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, January 2010, available at 

www.aau.edu/WorkArea/showcontent.aspx?id=10044. Referred to throughout this document as the Roundtable 

Report. 

4 Morris, S., Journal Authors' Rights: Perception and Reality (London: Publishing Research Consortium, 2009), 

http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/JournaIAuthorsRights.pdf. 

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and new solutions to associated permissions such as Creative Commonss licenses. These licenses provide 

a means for exercising certain rights regarding the re-use of an item. For example, these licenses could 

provide re-use rights if the resulting new works are also made available to the public. The Roundtable 

Report also notes that the number of journals making a change in business model is appreciable but 

small within the universe of more than 25,000 scholarly peer-reviewed journals." AlP echoes the 

Roundtable Report assertion that no existing digital business model has demonstrated its viability to the 

satisfaction of all, and cautions against government endorsement of any single approach. 

As part of the market's evolution and scholarly publishers' commitment to community and distribution 

of results, an increasing number of all types of journal publishers are electing to make their articles 

freely available to academics and others in 100 or more developing countries. Some well-known 

programs include the United Nation's HINARI, AGORA, and OARE Research4life programs, HighWire's 

Developing Economies Program, and JSTOR's Developing Nations Initiative. Additional programs include 

those of EIFL, INASP, and TEEAL. For descriptions of these and more, see 

www.library.yale.edu/Nllicense/develop.shtml. 

To meet the market's increasing demand for eaSily accessible, quality information, AlP invests 

considerably in new technologies for viewing and sharing its journals. Within just the past two years, AlP 

developed a mobile phone reader for journals, a professional (and freely available) social networking 

site for physical scientists (www.aipuniphy.org), and an electronic book platform. AlP also launched a 

multimedia journal on renewable energy (http://jrse.aip.org) and one of the first community-style 

journals in the physical sciences (http://aipadvances.aip.org). 

Such ongoing investments in existing products and services and the development costs for new products 

are funded through subscription fees or author payments. AlP and most other scholarly publishers offer 

an open access option for authors, no matter what type of journal they decided to publish in. Through 

AlP's Author Select, authors have the option to choose open access for their published article. Less than 

one percent of authors choose to do so. AlP Advances, AlP's newest journal, is an initiative based on 

community-style review, rapid publication, is fully open access, and employs a Creative Commons 

license. 

This ability for scientific publishers to experiment with different publication, business, and access 

models is paramount and assures the vitality, diversity, and effectiveness of scholarly communication, 

leading to scientific and technological advances. Rather than mandate business models and deincentivize market efficiencies, a more effective approach by government would be to incentivize the 

continued growth and vitality of the scholarly communication market for the benefit of the scholarly 

community. To that end, working with publishers, libraries, and other stakeholder communities, 

research agencies should identify specific needs of particular user groups and collaborate with 

publishers to meet those needs most effectively. Obviously, researchers, professionals, funders, and 

various segments of the general public (e.g., patients) have different information needs. AlP is 

collaborating with other scholarly publishers to identify and address any existing access gaps through 

5 Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/about) is a nonprofit corporation that provides free licenses and 

other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, 

use commercially, or any combination thereof. 

6 Ware, Mark and Michael Mabe, The STM Report: An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Journals Publishing. 

September 2009. 

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initiatives such as the low-cost article rental scheme pioneered by DeepDyve, the Research4Life 

consortium for developing countries (mentioned above), the patientiNFORM portal for patients or their 

caregivers, the Emergency Access Initiative offered to communities affected by natural disasters, and 

free or substantially discounted access for public libraries, journalists, and high schools. 

Nevertheless, based on our experimentation with a modest-cost article rental model (through 

DeepDyve), AlP remains unconvinced that there is a large unmet demand for public access: only a few 

thousand members ofthe general public attempted to access our scholarly content over a year's time, 

compared to the nearly eight million visitors to AlP content on our online platform. 

To maximize the effectiveness of its efforts, government has an important convener role to play in 

developing standards for data and metadata, and making research more readily searchable and 

discoverable. Publishers are already working in partnership to develop standardized information and 

collections through initiatives such as CrossReC (For more detail on this, please see response to 

Question 5.) 

With a relatively straightforward implementation of existing policy, government could make the fundercollected and maintained outputs of taxpayer-funded research, such as grant reports and research 

progress reports, freely available to the public.8 Furthermore, to incentivize open access publishing, 

funds could be made available specifically to support payment for open access to published articles as 

pilot projects. Several research funders already do this (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome 

Trust, and Max-Planck Institutes). 

In the same vein, government funding could be provided to license content from publishers in order to 

make it available to specific audiences. (Publishers license content to customers of many kinds, including 

government agencies, and have the ability to ensure its continued availability with existing 

infrastructure.) 

AlP has been a leading participant in organizing working groups that are proposing and planning 

partnerships with NSF and DOE on access, linking of grantee reports to publications, data mining across 

agency-publisher databases, tools and methodology for identifying publicly funded work, and potential 

pilot projects in the above areas. (More detail on this can be found in response to Question 5.) 

Government mandates for public access come at a significant cost to the US economy and to the 

scientific enterprise. The National Institute of Health's (NIH) PubMed Central (PMC) data indicates that 

two-thirds of its users are from overseas. This suggests that critical export opportunities for the industry 

may be compromised, resulting in loss of US jobs. Significant economic value added generated by the 

publishing industry could be wasted if revenue derived from sales in the global market is compromised 

7 CrossRef (www.crossref.org) is a not-for-profit group founded by publishers in 2002 and maintains 50 million 

items. Almost 1000 publishers participate, assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOls) to published content items. 

Development of the CrossRef service has resulted in seamless navigation of the research literature by users so that 

researchers using the bibliography in one article can link from a reference to the full text of the referenced article. 

8 This would ensure readability to the broadest audience. NSF is already pursuing such a policy, see 

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/porfaqs.jsp, and DOE through its Office of Scientific and Technical 

Information provides public access to nearly 300,000 DOE-funded research reports, see 

http://www . osti .gov /bridge/. 

AlP 
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or eliminated. Furthermore, mandates often result in additional costs for publishers. For example, 

although only a very small portion of AlP's content is subject to the NIH public access mandate (AlP is 

primarily a physical science publisher), AlP had to incur costs to modify formats and procedures in order 

to deposit manuscripts into PMC. AlP remains concerned that PMC is shifting readers from the 

publishers' sites to PMC despite linking arrangements, thus undermining the value of the publishers' 

investments. 

AlP has concerns about any government policy affecting global trade balance. The number of papers 

submitted to AlP journals from China exceeded the US submissions two years ago. In response, AlP 

opened an editorial and marketing office in China to help promote established AlP journals in the 

physical sciences in China, rather than see China develop competing international journals. Free and 

unimpeded access to US journal content, even if one were to factor in a short embargo period, will 

undermine our and other US publishers' needed revenue to establish business relationships in 

potentially lucrative and large global markets such as China. 

In summary, AlP believes that publishers should continue to be free to experiment with various business 

models in the marketplace of ideas and economics. AlP endorses the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable 

recommendation that "Agency policies should encourage the development, in a competitive landscape, 

of new value-added information products and services that take advantage of a scholarly environment 

in which articles are increasingly interoperable and available through licenses that support creative 

reuse. Such development should be carried out on a level playing field among all those who would 

devise such products and services." We believe that it is essential that any public access process does 

not undermine the ability of the market to create and sustain peer-reviewed journals. 

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, 

scientists, federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination of 

peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research? Conversely, 

are there policies that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly 

publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of publishers, scientists, federal 

agencies, and other stakeholders? 

Scientific publishers, such as AlP, rely heavily on the reputation of their journals to compete in the 

marketplace. Copyright protection reinforces the motivation for sustaining managed peer review, 

thereby protecting a journal's reputation. Any policy decisions regarding the publication and 

dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research 

must respect US copyright law as it presently exists. Under the law, these works meet the criteria for 

copyright protection. It is a constitutional right granted to the copyright holder to exercise the exclusive 

rights attached to a work. In its role as the guardian of those rights, government must seek to strike the 

appropriate balance for all stakeholders through fair interpretation of the law. 

It is AlP's position that agencies should provide free public access to final research reports and link to 

the peer-reviewed journal articles, which are available through a variety of access mechanisms. This 

solution would drive the standardization of information reported on publicly funded research, promote 

rapid dissemination (rather than waiting for an article to be authored and subsequently peer reviewed), 

and ensure preservation of intellectual property rights, which provide the incentive for producing, 

distributing, and preserving all forms of intellectual property. 

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AlP encourages agency policies and actions that work to ensure copyrighted materials are protected 

from unauthorized dissemination and piracy. Copyright is an essential ingredient in promoting creativity, 

innovation, and the continued integrity and reliability of the scholarly record. There is some evidence 

that the NIH policy undermines intellectual property rights and promotes piracy of intellectual property. 

As noted in response to Question 1, the NIH public access policy and availability of articles through NIH's 

database, PMC, undermine an important US export market. Furthermore, copyrighted material 

downloaded from PMC appears on rogue Internet sites, resulting in millions of dollars in annual losses to 

US publishers. 

Nearly all SCholarly publishers adopt liberal copyright policy, allowing authors to post copies of their 

manuscript on their individual and institutional websites with very little restriction, share copies with 

colleagues, and to use their manuscripts for other educational and research purposes. Only commercial 

use is restricted and enforced by the industry. 

(3) What are the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized approaches to managing public access 

to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded research in terms of 

interoperability, search, development of analytic tools, and other scientific and commercial 

opportunities? Are there reasons why a federal agency (or agencies) should maintain custody of all 

published content, and are there ways that the government can ensure long-term stewardship if 

content is distributed across multiple private sources? 

Although a centralized data platform has some obvious advantages of simplicity of operation, the use of 

a centralized, government-controlled platform for a large corpus of scholarly content has significant 

downsides, including increased costs to the government. A centralized approach discourages innovation 

by driving traffic away from innovators, including publishers, thus minimizing scientific and commercial 

opportunities. However, an important role for government in this arena would be to drive and fund the 

development of interoperability standards and promote the widespread use of such standards. 

AlP supports the recommendation of the Roundtable Report that states that government policies should 

be guided by the need to foster interoperability and encourages" ... additional multiagency programs 

supporting research and development to expand interoperability capacity and to develop and promote 

additional interoperability practices and standards." The Roundtable Report further notes that the 

National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and other agencies provide important funding 

for the development of interoperability capacities through their cyberinfrastructure programs. 

In developing public access policies and procedures, agencies should carefully consider international 

cooperation with a larger vision that includes building standards and fostering distributed systems that 

are global in scope and go far beyond the work funded by US federal research dollars. In the Internet 

age, research and research resources are distributed globally. US federally funded research is only one 

part of the entire universe of information on any given topic, and in some disciplines, research is 

increasingly non-US government funded. A centralized repository such as PubMed Central, though by 

some measures successful, is not a model that is universally applicable or necessarily the best model for 

the future. Indeed, the success of the World Wide Web is its evolving capability to connect an 

exponentially growing array of highly distributed information resources and databases. Any successful 

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and optimized scientific publishing system will incorporate effective incentives to implement and 

expand interoperability and reuse across internationally distributed databases. 

It is AlP's position that stewardship of publications in the Internet age should be the collaborative 

responsibility of the publishing, library, and research communities. US government involvement in the 

long-term stewardship of publications is best addressed as part of the copyright system and through the 

library of Congress digital preservation initiatives primarily as a promoter of standards, as noted above, 

and as one of many stewards of specific data platforms that need to be linked across public and private 

boundaries. 

What constitutes a publication and the nature of publication is changing with technology. A publication 

is no longer just a chunk of text fixed in time forever but a fluid representation. Publications can include 

supplemental material, multimedia files, software, links to resources on the web, and can be revised and 

corrected over time by the authors and publishers, hence the emergence of new community initiatives 

such as CrossRef's CrossMark9 service, which electronically watermarks an article's Version of Record 

(VoR), and DataCite,lO which extends the CrossRef-promoted Digital Object Identifier (DOl) to datasets. 

Any plan for the future should recognize that the static aggregation/library model is not likely to hold up 

well in the distributed and dynamic Internet milieu. 

AlP believes that it is unlikely that one optimal procedure for preservation and stewardship would 

emerge to become applicable across all of scholarly publishing. For now, AlP strongly recommends that 

agency policies embrace diversity, decentralization, and interoperability. In the long term, systematic 

collaborations among stakeholders (government, publishers, universities and their libraries, and other 

not-for-profit participants in the scholarly publishing system) will be necessary to achieve maximum 

benefit. We note that libraries, in partnership with publishers, have established entities for preservation 

of digital documents that are already in wide use, for example, Portico" and ClOCKSS12 

long-term stewardship of content comes at significant cost that is being borne by publishers. In an era 

of dwindling federal resources, central federal repositories are duplicative, an unnecessary expense, and 

a recurring burden that may not be viable in the short or long term. long-term stewardship might be 

more suitably carried out by the private sector or through collaborative stakeholder projects. There are 

productive ways to define appropriate roles of government and nongovernmental participants in the 

system, and ways that government agencies and nongovernmental stakeholders can collaborate as 

9 CrossMark (www.crossmark.com) is a current pilot project of CrossRef to that will allow readers to easily 

determine whether they are looking at the publisher-maintained, stewarded version of a journal article. 

10 DataCite (http://datacite.org) is a not-for-profit organization established to facilitate easier access to research 

data on the Internet, increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scholarly 

record, and support data archiving that will permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study. 

11 Portico (http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/) is a digital preservation service provided by a not-forprofit organization with a mission to help the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the 

scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. It is among the largest communitysupported digital archives in the world, working with libraries, publishers, and funders to preserve e-journals, ebooks, and other electronic scholarly content. 

12 CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a noHor-profit joint venture between the world's leading scholarly publishers 

and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to 

ensure the long-term survival of web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research 

community (http://www.ciockss.org/ciockss/Home). 

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equal partners to their mutual benefit in strengthening the scholarly publishing system and expanding 

public access to its outputs. 

(4) Are there models or new ideas for public-private partnerships that take advantage of existing 

publisher archives and encourage innovation in accessibility and interoperability, while ensuring longterm stewardship of the results of federally funded research? 

Yes, please see detailed response to Question 5 below. 

(5) What steps can be taken by federal agencies, publishers, and/or scholarly and professional 

societies to encourage interoperable search, discovery, and analYSis capacity across disciplines and 

archives? What are the minimum core metadata for scholarly publications that must be made 

available to the public to allow such capabilities? How should federal agencies make certain that such 

minimum core metadata associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded 

scientific research are publicly available to ensure that these publications can be easily found and 

linked to federal science funding? 

To facilitate public access and drive and support scholarship, agency databases should be able to 

communicate with each other. Each agency's policies should include common core properties that 

promote access to and interoperability among the content in all public access databases. Specifically, 

AlP encourages agencies to develop collaborations and partnerships with scientific publishers to develop 

and implement: 

• Standards and persistent identifiers to enhance the discoverability of research results and to 

promote interoperability among agency, publisher, and any third party databases and 

platforms; 

• Discovery tools to facilitate journal content mining; and 

• Pilot projects that would drive access, use, and innovation from research results. 

Specifics on these items are discussed below. 

Beyond common properties, agencies should have the flexibility to manage and modify their policies in 

response to evolving circumstances. Agencies should fully engage researchers, institutions, and 

publishers working in fields that coincide with the agencies' missions, both in establishing initial public 

access policies and in modifying those policies as appropriate over time. 

Many scholarly publishing organizations, such as AlP, were founded by scientists for scientists and fully 

embrace providing publishing and other services as their primary mission. As part of this, AlP's CEO was 

an active member the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable and subsequently helped organize working 

groups of nonprofit and commercial publishers to propose and implement joint projects with both the 

DOE and NSF with a mutually agreed-upon goals. Moreover, AlP is a cofounder of CrossRef and 

participates in a number of standards organizations such as the National Information Standards 

Organization (NISO-www.niso.org), National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAISwww.nfais.org), and the newly formed consortium Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCIDwww.orcid.org), with a purpose to develop unique researcher identifiers. 

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Standards and Identifiers: Agency Funding Infarmation 

Most funding agencies currently require researchers to acknowledge in publications the support that 

they have received. There are no standards, however, on how this should be done. Consequently, 

agency funders find it difficult to know what publications have arisen from the research they have 

funded. AlP has promoted the recommendation that publishers develop, in collaboration with funding 

agencies and CrossRef, a means of standardizing funder information and make that information 

available to funding agencies and the public. We believe that a community-wide solution of this type will 

be easier and far less expensive to deliver than for each agency to develop its own response to the 

problem. This is because publishers are in the best position to provide a simple way of ensuring that 

journal articles are accompanied by standardized, high-quality metadata providing information about 

the agency, program, and the specific grant that funded the research. It would be very expensive for 

agencies to obtain this information through data mining existing publisher databases. 

This proposal has been endorsed by CrossRef and the major scientific, technical, and medical (5TM) 

publishing trade associations: the Professional and Scholarly Publications Division of the American 

Association of Publishers (PSP-AAP) and the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical 

Publishers. Related to this proposal, the DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has 

agreed to maintain a registry of standard nomenclature for funding agencies and the associated naming 

and numbering system for grants. OSTI already houses technical reports and data sets for more than 40 

federal and international funding organizations. 

With the successful implementation of this funding identity proposal by STM publishers and CrossRef, 

agencies would have access to standard meta data from published articles. By displaying this information 

on agency websites, visitors-from the research community to the general public-could follow the link 

[enabled through the Digital Object Identifier (001)] to the publisher's platform where article abstracts 

are freely available and the Version of Record (VoR) (maintained by the publishers) is available through a 

variety of access mechanisms, including innovative rental access models, which give the public instant 

access for a modest fee. More than 40 scholarly publishers are currently testing this access mechanism. 

Standards and Identifiers: DOls for Data Sets and Supplementary Material 

Increasingly throughout the world, grant investigators are being asked to share or provide plans 

regarding how they will share with other researchers the primary data, samples, physical collections, 

and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of their work. Grantees are expected 

to encourage and facilitate such sharing. Scholarly publishers are already participating in a number of 

initiatives designed to facilitate the voluntary sharing of data or to foster interoperability among data 

sharing repositories, and they would be willing to work with NSF, DOE, and other database/repository 

operators to develop recommended practices for assigning DOls to data sets and supplementary 

material. 

For data policies, publishers would draw on their experience with initiatives such as Opportunities for 

Data Exchange (ODE; see www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/current-projects/ode). which aims to 

gather and promote best practices on the way scientific data are treated, and CoData, a partner of the 

International Council for Science (ICSU) World Data System (www.icsu-wds.org). The goals of the 

relatively new ICSU World Data System (WDS) are to create a global federated system of long-term data 

archives and data-related services covering a wide spectrum of natural sciences, thereby encouraging 

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interdisciplinary scientific approaches. For supporting information, publishers would draw on their 

involvement with the joint NISO/NFAIS Working Group on Supplementary Journal Information (see 

www.niso.org). 

Standards and Identifiers: Author Disambiguation 

Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems embedded in the scholarly research 

ecosystem. AlP encourages agencies to work in collaboration with publishers as well as universities, 

funding organizations, and corporations from around the world to eliminate this problem through 

ORCID. ORCID is a newly established nonprofit organization whose goal is to establish an open, 

independent registry of researchers that is adopted and embraced as an industry-wide standard to 

resolve systemic name ambiguity by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's 

research contributions. Researchers will be able to create, edit, and maintain an ORCID ID and profile 

free of charge and will define and control the privacy settings of their own ORCID profile data. 

Participants expect that accurate identification of researchers and their work will facilitate emergence of 

new services and benefits for the research community by all types of stakeholders in scholarly 

communication: from commercial actors to nonprofit organizations, and from governments to 

universities. 

Such a standard will not only enhance the scientific discovery process but also improve the efficiency of 

funding and collaboration. Participation in ORCID is open to any organization that has an interest in 

scholarly communications. All profile data contributed to ORCID by researchers or claimed by them will 

be available in standard formats for free download (subject to the researchers' own privacy settings) 

that is updated once a year and released under a Creative Commons license. All software developed by 

ORCID will be publicly released under an open-source software license approved by the Open Source 

Initiative (051). For the software it adopts, ORCID will prefer open source. ORCID is governed by 

representatives from a broad cross section of stakeholders, including publishers, library organizations, 

research institutions, and funding agencies (see http://orcid.org/board-of-directors). 

Discovery Tools: Content Mining 

Content mining can be especially useful to the scientific community in driving interdisciplinary research 

and supporting the identification of new areas of discovery, and publishers are committed to managing 

content in modern digital formats to ensure that users gain maximum benefit. Scholarly publishers 

should work with funding agencies to develop pilot projects for journal content mining that would 

create thesauri, using their expertise to identify, organize, and analyze content to create conceptual 

links within and between highly technical subject matter. Although there are various ways to perform 

this type of processing, certain elements are common to all methods, including an automated way to 

process all sizes and types of content in which to identify relevant information and facilitate its 

extraction and analysis. 

Such pilots should focus on goals such as the following: 

• Structuring input text, deriving patterns within the structured text, and evaluating and 

interpreting the output; 

• Extracting semantic entities from publisher content for the purpose of recognition and 

classification of the relations among them; and 

AlP 

Enabling developers who wish to design and implement applications to analyze publishers' 

content, or test applications, as part of their research within publishers' content. 
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Consensus approaches within the community could also be explored for developing better standardized, 

mining-friendly content formats, a shared content mining platform, and common permission rules for 

content mining. The Publishers Research Consortium recently completed a study on article-level content 

mining based on a broad survey of ongoing or planned activities among nearly 30 STM publishers or 

associations (see 

www.publishingresearch.netjdocuments!PRCSmiUAMreport20June2011VersionofRecord.pdf). 

Pi/at Projects: Sponsored Access to Published Research 

The "Gold Open Access" dissemination model, which includes an article processing charge paid by the 

author or their institution, delivers immediate and unrestricted online access to the final published 

article (defined by NISO as the Version of Record). 

AlP suggests that agencies could work with publishers to set up experiments to answer the following 

questions dealing with the cost, benefits, and sustainability of the Gold Open Access model, as well as 

investigate how such a model should be funded and administered: 

How much would it cost an agency to fund Gold Open Access in the aggregate and on a perarticle basis? 

What is the most effective method to provide Gold Open Access funding for authors? The ability 

to use grant funds for sponsorship? A separate pool of funding reserved solely for Gold Open 

Access sponsorship? Other means? 

Should authors be required to expend grant funds on publishing of their articles? If not, how can 

authors be encouraged to utilize the available funds? (Several methods/messages could be 

tested.) 

How can agencies best administer a Gold Open Access program? 

Does Gold Open Access offer agencies new opportunities to showcase the productivity of their 

funding activities to the American public and federal oversight committees? 

Pi/at Projects: Linking to/from Research Reports 

AlP encourages federal agencies to fund a pilot project that would seek to determine whether and how 

publisher content derived from agency-funded research could be mapped against agency research 

reports and other content. Specifically, the pilot would send users from publisher websites to the agency 

website to view free government-sponsored research reports and would, likewise, send users from the 

agency websites to publisher sites to view free abstracts and links to the Version of Record of articles 

connected to a particular research report or funded project. 

If successful, this would result in interoperability between onsite agency content and publisher 

platforms. This is of interest to scholarly publishers because they would like to work with major research 

funders to identify, organize, evaluate, and highlight published results from federally funded research, 

as well as identify relationships, projects, and offerings that might be applicable to other research 

funders. 

Possible outcomes ofthe pilot could include: 

AlP 

The ability to identify all agency-funded research within publisher offerings and the ability to 

deliver associated metadata to agencies, 

The ability to establish mechanisms and approaches that could be implemented (for all research 

funders) across the industry, 
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• A capability to report to major funders on the impact of the research they fund, e.g., through 

bibliometric and other tools, 

A "research dashboard" capability or the ability to contribute to one already in existence, e.g., 

http://rd-dashboard.nitrd.gov/, 

• A mechanism for low-cost content rental access to published articles (Versions of Record) and a 

mechanism to explore its impact, 

• Subject area content portfolios of agency-funded research articles for internal agency use (e.g., 

study sections), 

• The possibility to use the DOE-OSTI platform (the http://www.science.gov/)toextendthispilot 

to other federal funding agencies, and 

• Models to illustrate how traditional publishing systems can coexist with self-archiving. 

(6) How can federal agencies that fund science maximize the benefit of public access policies to US 

taxpayers, and their investment in the peer-reviewed literature, while minimizing burden and costs 

for stakeholders, including awardee institutions, scientists, publishers, federal agencies, and libraries? 

An excellent mechanism to ensure public access to federally funded research results is by providing 

access to final agency reports. Every federally funded research project is required by law to provide a 

detailed final report. The research reports are a condition of the government contract. These reports 

should be archived and made accessible to the pUblic. Some science funding agencies make these 

reports freely available via the web, others do not. Making all such reports available and accessible in a 

comprehensive and systematic way would solve an essential public access problem. One leading 

example is DOE's Office of Scientific and Technological Information, which publishes final reports online 

in a portal called Information Bridge. These reports are not journal articles, but the final reports are 

often much longer than the resulting journal article (if such article exists-researchers typically publish 

only positive results and then have to meet the publication standards of the journals in their field) and 

provide more information. 

Moreover, NSF instituted a new reporting requirement as a result of specific legislation in the America 

COMPETES Act (Section 7010: Reporting of Research Results), which required that "all final project 

reports and citations of published research documents resulting from research funded in whole, or in 

part, by the Foundation, are made available to the public in a timely manner and in electronic form 

through the Foundation's Website." For several years, publishers have proposed working with authors 

to develop short abstracts for a lay audience to accompany each research report. 

Publishers are partnering with federal agencies to develop policies that maximize public access to 

research results and provide easy links between research reports (detailing research results, perhaps 

including lay summaries) and the peer-reviewed Version of Record, including complete access to the 

abstract or summary. Such projects would result in interoperability between funder and publisher 

content, ensuring access and better reporting on the results of funding. 

In addition, please see the response to Question 5 above for specific agency initiatives. 

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(7) Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting from 

federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these 

public access policies? 

No. Publishers also invest in these other types of content used by researchers, often by conceptualizing 

the project, commissioning the content, and investing heavily in its development. Any kind of mandated 

access to that content is an expropriation of that content. 

(8) What is the appropriate embargo period after publication before the public is granted free access 

to the full content of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research? 

Please describe the empirical basis for the recommended embargo period. Analyses that weigh public 

and private benefits and account for external market factors, such as competition, price changes, 

library budgets, and other factors, will be particularly useful. Are there evidence-based arguments 

that can be made that the delay period should be different for specific disciplines or types of 

publications? 

AlP believes that a uniform access policy or mandate for scholarly publications would be an ineffective 

approach. An overarching government-wide policy or embargo period would fail to accommodate such 

key factors as the specific needs of any given agency, the rapidly changing nature of scholarly publishing, 

and the unique considerations of the various fields of science and the journals that serve them. 

AlP analyzed related industry data using the "cited half-life" metric as a relative indicator for how long 

journal titles within scientific categories are being accessed and cited, thus reflecting economic viability. 

The findings could help inform considerations related to embargo periods. Based on the evidence 

related to AlP journals and to journals covering physics and related sciences, significant economic 

uncertainty remains with the assignment of minimum embargo periods. In looking at a sample of several 

phYSics and related topics and AlP journals within those categories, AlP found that physics journals have 

a longer cited half-life compared to some other scientific disciplines, and furthermore, AlP Journals have 

a longer cited half-life than their respective physics category averages. 

The chart on the following page provides are some examples. 

AlP 
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22 December 2011 

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Cited Half-Life of AlP Journals/Physics vs. Other Scientific Disciplines 

The cited half-life for the journal is the median age of its items cited in the current year. Half of the 

citations to the journal are to items published within the cited half-life. 

Scientific Categories 

Applied Physics 

Chemical Physics 

Physics-Fluids & Plasmas 

Mathematical Physics 

Medicine, Research and 

Experimentation 

Cardiac & Cardia Systems 

Emergency Medicine 

Robotics 

Average Cited 

Half-Life within 

Su b-Category 

(Years) 

5.6 

7.1 

6.6 

6.5 

5.4 

4.9 

5.7 

5.5 

Source: Thomson Reuters, 151 Web of Knowledge, 

Journal Citation Reports, Year 2010 

Average Cited 

Half-life of AlP 

Journals within 

Sub-Category 

(Years) 

7.8 

>10 

7.6 

>10 

AlP Journals in Category 

Applied Physics Letters, journal af 

Applied Physics, jaurnal af Low 

Temperature Physics, Review of 

Scientific Instruments 

The journal of Chemical Physics 

Physics of Fluids, Physics of 

Plasmas 

journal of Mathematical Physics 

In lieu of trying to solve the public access problem by imposing a one-size-fits-all solution with a fixed 

embargo length for all articles that have some component of federal funding or introducing a 

complicated scheme for varying embargo lengths (as necessary to address field-specific conditions), AlP 

proposes a simpler system that allows government to accomplish public access in a way that is not only 

effective, efficient, and sustainable, but also keeps the US scientific enterprise thriving as it moves into 

the future. 

To summarize the key components, AlP and a number of our colleagues from the scientific publishing 

community propose the following scheme to improve public access to the results of publically funded 

research: 

1. Scholarly publishers as a group have proposed modifications to their author submission 

software so that all journal articles written after the implementation date would include funding 

agency information along with the standard metadata that is already being deposited in 

CrossRef and other standard bibliographic databases. This new meta data, which specifically tags 

the funding agency(s) responsible for the research leading to the journal article, would be 

deposited in the CrossRef database. (The CrossRef database has been developed and 

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maintained by this nonprofit consortium for the past 12 years and now contains the metadata 

for more than 50 million scholarly articles and related content.} Funding agencies can procure a 

license to this database at modest cost-many already have. Such a license provides access to 

the article metadata, including the critical article identifier (the DOl). 

2. With the successful implementation of this funding identity proposal by scholarly publishers and 

CrossRef, agencies would have access to the standard metadata from published articles. By 

displaying this information on agency websites, visitors-from the research community to the 

general public-could follow the link [enabled through the Digital Object Identifier (DOl)] to the 

publisher's platform where article abstracts are freely available and the Version of Record (VoR) 

(maintained by the publishers) is available through a variety of access mechanisms, including 

innovative rental access models, which give the public instant access for a modest fee. More 

than 40 scholarly publishers are currently testing this access mechanism. 

3. Scholarly publishers have proposed and initiated pilot projects with funding agencies to link 

agency research reports and related content on agency sites to publisher content tagged with 

the same funding information, thus expanding interoperability between agency and publisher 

databases and access to the linked content. 

AlP 
158 

AI P American Institute of Physics 

One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MO 20740·3843 H. Fredertck Dylla, Executive Director and CEO 

22 December 2011 

Submission for the Record: Response to November 4, 2011 Federal Register Notice of Request for 

Information, OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY, Public Access 

to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research; 

FR Doc. 2011-28621 

Submitted by: H. Frederick Dylla, Executive Director and CEO, American Institute of Physics 

Tel. +1301-209-3131; Dylla@aip.org 

Electronically submitted to: digitaldata@ostp.gov 

The American Institute of Physics (AlP) appreciates this opportunity to submit comments and would be 

delighted to continue working with OSTP and other federal partners through a process of active 

engagement. 

About AlP 

The American Institute of Physics (AlP) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit membership corporation created in 

1931 for the purpose of "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge of the science of physics and its 

applications to human welfare." AlP is an organization of 10 physical sciences societies representing 

more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators. As one of the largest publishers of scientific 

information in physics, AlP employs innovative publishing technologies and offers publishing services for 

its Member Societies. AlP's suite of publications includes 15 journals, three of which are published in 

partnership with other organizations; magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and 

the AlP Conference Proceedings series. AlP delivers valuable resources and expertise in education and 

student services, science communication, government relations, career services for science and 

engineering professionals, statistical research, industrial outreach, and the history of physics and other 

sciences. 

Enabled by Internet technologies, AlP disseminates more information, more widely and more 

affordably, than ever before in its history, reaching more authors, subscribers, and users than ever 

before. This accomplishment requires heavy investments in technology and infrastructure (such as an 

online platform) and business-model innovation to deliver the option of free or low-cost access: open 

access, pay-per-view, or article rental, recognizing that the value of the final published article needs to 

be paid for to remain sustainable. 

Introduction 

AlP's highest goal is to achieve the widest possible dissemination of the research results it publishes, 

including any pertinent associated data and context information. As a scholarly publisher, AlP believes 

that better discoverability and reuse of original research data are to be encouraged at all levels and 

among all stakeholders. AlP also believes that data resulting directly from federally funded scientific 

AlP 
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research should be made freely available in a sustainable manner and that this is best achieved through 

appropriate policies that leverage public-private collaboration. 

AlP believes that it would be in the best interest of the United States and its government, as well as in 

the best interest of all other stakeholders, to strike a balance between public access and sustenance of 

the scholarly publishing industry because of the impact and value it brings to the progress of science and 

its contributions to American society and economy. Such a balance can be achieved based on shared 

principles such as the importance of peer review, the recognition of economic realities through 

adaptable and viable publishing business models, the need to ensure secure archiving and preservation 

of scholarly information, and the desirability of broad access. Policies should recognize that hosting, 

maintaining and preserving raw data or data sets, and continuing to make such data available over the 

long term, has a cost, which, in certain circumstances, the host should be entitled to recover. One way 

to achieve this balance is for government to adopt a senSible, flexible, and cautious approach to drafting 

public access policies-an approach that engages all concerned parties, including federal agencies, 

scientists, university administrators, librarians, publishers, and the public. 

Consistent with the recognition of economic realities, it is AlP's position that government agencies 

should develop their public access policies through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental 

stakeholders, including researchers and publishers. Any policies should be guided by the need to foster 

interoperability of information across mUltiple databases and platforms. Agencies' efforts then could be 

directed toward facilitating cyberinfrastructure and collaboration programs with and between agencies 

and the stakeholders to develop robust standards for the structure of full text and metadata, navigation 

tools, and other applications to achieve interoperability across the scholarly literature. More detail on 

this is provided later in the document. AlP believes that any scholarly publication access policy needs to 

be flexible to accommodate agency-specific needs and have the capacity to evolve in response to the 

rapidly changing nature of scholarly publishing. 

AlP specifically recommends that federal grants set aside funds to support researcher data management 

and deposit efforts. Federal agencies could also playa role in supporting and encouraging the 

establishment of discipline-specific data archives where these are currently lacking. The amount and 

type of support should be determined in collaboration with key stakeholders involved in the depOSit, 

storage, and preservation of data. 

Federal poliCies should also focus on supporting and encouraging the development of community 

standards for the citation and reuse of data sets, thereby facilitating the creation of a system that gives 

researchers an incentive to share data resulting from federal grants. 

AlP Responses to RFI Questions 

Preservation, Discoverability, and Access 

(1) What specific Federal policies would encourage public access to and the preservation of broadly 

valuable digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research, to grow the U.S. economy and 

improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise? 

We would make the distinction that it is not "public access" in the broadest sense that is important but 

rather access by other scientists who can use the digital data for the further advancement of science. 

AlP 
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As data are not copyrightable, policies about access become policies about deposit by the data owner or 

proxy into an accessible system. It should be noted, though, that any policies should recognize and take 

into account differences between 'databases' (information products created for the specific display and 

retrieval of data) and 'data sets' (sets or collections of raw relevant data captured in the course of 

research or other efforts). Policies could require that data generated from federally-funded research be 

deposited in a certified and openly accessible repository; furthermore, researchers could be encouraged 

to make these deposits upon submission of their first manuscript showing results that were based on 

the data set. Although some agencies already have a preservation/access role (for example, DOE Order 

241.1B), AlP agrees with the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data that "data stewardship is best 

accomplished in a system that includes distributed collections and repositories maintained where the 

custodian has trusted community-proxy status with the relevant communities of practice." Agency 

policies should support and encourage such a distributed system for both access and preservation; that 

is, poliCies should recognize and build upon the broad set of capabilities that exist for both access and 

preservation within the library and publishing communities for both documents and data, such as 

Portico, LOCKSS. 

The integrity of preserved data would also need to be taken into account and supported by any policy. 

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, 

scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders, with respect to any existing or proposed policies 

for encouraging public access to and preservation of digital data resulting from federally funded 

scientific research? 

All policies should comply with current copyright and patent law. Data should be embargoed to the 

principal researcher until conclusions drawn from the data can be published in the research literature. 

An additional maximum embargo of one year would also provide for the filing of patents by the grantees 

(or their institution) as allowed by many, if not all, funding agencies (HR 1249 Sec 102{b){l)(A)). See also 

the distinction between databases and data sets as addressed response to question 1. 

(3) How could Federal agencies take into account inherent differences between scientific disciplines 

and different types of digital data when developing policies on the management of data? 

Differences between scientific disciplines and types of digital data must be taken into account by 

domain experts at the time of proposal review (note the language used in the Data Management Plan 

FAQ's of NSF in a variety of instances: "to be determined by the community of interest through the 

process of peer review and program management.") Only such experts will be able to determine if the 

data to be generated by the proposed research will be of longer term value to the scientific community 

of interest and if its type conforms to acceptable community standards. 

Metadata-data about the data-which would include information both about what the data is and how 

it was collected, is addressed further in this response. 

AlP 
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(4) How could agency policies consider differences in the relative costs and benefits of long-term 

stewardship and dissemination of different types of data resulting from federally funded research? 

Policies must first recognize that not all data is worth preserving. Each type of data should be assessed 

regarding long-term stewardship. Policies would have to take into account not just the size of the 

datasets but also long-term usability, which depends on the rate of technology change, and level of 

documentation required. Along with the data, enough information needs to be preserved to reproduce 

the dataset. As noted in the answer to question 3, agencies will need to call upon data experts as well 

as scientific experts. 

(5) How can stakeholders (e.g., research communities, universities, research institutions, libraries, 

scientific publishers) best contribute to the impleml!ntation of data management plans? 

There needs to be an interconnected system for access to and sharing and preservation of data based 

on community-developed standards and best practices. The system needs to encourage innovation and 

must support multiple solutions-data as an information resource is inherently more complicated than 

scholarly articles. Each stakeholder will then need to contribute based on their specific skills and 

expertise. Libraries, through Institutional Repositories, could take on a stronger preservation role. 

Publishers have been adding value to the research process and providing access to and preservation of 

the scholarly literature for hundreds of years and could extend this to data, well beyond current support 

for supplemental material. Universities and research institutions have both scientific domain knowledge 

and data and information experts. Any system will need to preserve incentives for innovation. 

Consider, for example, work being done by the Data Preservation Alliance for Social Sciences through 

their partnership with the Library of Congress, LOCKSS, and Dataverse to prototype a policy-based 

replicated data archive. 

Other examples include: 

• linking between data sets and their resulting scholarly publications based on communityaccepted standards, thus ensuring data sets become part of the scientific literature; 

• Having clear standards and guidelines for the certification and auditing of data repositories; 

encouraging a system that incentivizes data repositories to maintain the accuracy or integrity of 

the data once it has been deposited; 

• Incentivizing the deposit of data sets and ensuring that the administrative burden this imposes 

on researchers minimal. 

(6) How could funding mechanisms be improved to better address the real costs of preserving and 

making digital data accessible? 

Require data management plans and coordinate plan requirements across agencies and to community 

standards (see the Open Archive Information System Reference Model-ISO standard 14721:2003). 

What constitutes data that needs to be preserved should be clearly identified through the process of 

peer review and program management. Preserving and disseminating digital data should then be 

considered "part of the cost" of funding and doing research, not "an additional cost". Funding agencies 

could emphasize that proposals must take into account data fit for reuse and preservation. Again, this 

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should be the approach across agencies. Research labs/institutions/university overhead rates would 

need to include costs of data preservation. 

As pointed out in the final report from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation 

and Access (Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet): "Policy mechanisms can play an important role 

in strengthening weak motivations" as there is often "misalignment of incentives between communities 

that benefit from preservation (and therefore have an incentive to preserve), and those that are in a 

position to preserve (because they own or control it) but lack incentives to do so." 

(7) What approaches could agencies take to measure, verify, and improve compliance with Federal 

data stewardship and access policies for scientific research? How can the burden of compliance and 

verification be minimized? 

If data is created in the course of federally-funded research, then the funding agency could require that 

any such data deemed to be "preservation data" be deposited in a recognized archive. Through direct 

agency involvement in creating a "comprehensive framework for data access and preservation" based 

on community-accepted standards and best practices for data citation and reuse, agencies would 

maintain lists of certified repositories. Certified repositories could be similar to the data center members 

of the DataCite organization (of which DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information is a member) 

or participants in the SafeArchive program of Data-PASS. In addition, grantee data management plans 

could be required to identify all datasets expected to be produced from funded work. 

Certification of compliance would then simply require grantee reporting to include in reports on their 

funded proposal the data citations and the repository where the data was deposited. 

As work is already being carried out to develop standards in this area (i.e. The ISO 16363 Standard for 

Trusted Digital Repositories), it would be more expedient for federal agencies to work within and help 

support such standards. 

(8) What additional steps could agencies take to stimulate innovative use of publicly accessible 

research data in new and existing markets and industries to create jobs and grow the economy? 

AlP agrees with the statement from the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD) in its 

report, Harnessing the Power of Digital Data for Science and Society, that "the current landscape lacks a 

comprehensive framework for reliable digital [data] preservation, access, and interoperability". We feel 

that there is a very important role for the federal government and its science funding agencies to play to 

help create and promulgate such a comprehensive framework. 

Federal investment in creating stable, standardized, and accessible data will be an essential base from 

which innovation can occur. The ease of reuse could then lead to developments akin to IBM Research's 

"Many Eyes" product for data visualization (www-958.ibm.com), or spur the private sector to offer data 

services for researchers. 

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(9) What mechanisms could be developed to assure that those who produced the data are given 

appropriate attribution and credit when secondary results are reported? 

This ecosystem of attribution and credit already exists with respect to scholarly articles. A researcher's 

standing in their field is largely a result of their list of authored scholarly articles and the number of 

citations to those published articles. The credit comes in the form of respect from peers, funding for 

further work, and career advancement, and rests in large part on the underlying quality control provided 

by peer review. Not providing appropriate attribution is considered unethical scientific behavior and can 

lead to the retraction of published work. 

The mechanisms to be developed would support an extension of this system to cover data. The 

elements to support are: 

data must be recognized as a primary research output, 

data must have unique and persistent identifiers and be fully citable, thereby allowing its use 

and reuse to be tracked and recorded in the same way as scholarly publications, and 

data citation information must be used for research evaluation and reward. 

Persistent identifiers for data could be handled through use of digital object identifiers already used for 

scholarly articles or similar (see Datacite.org). There are also examples of recommended practice for 

citing data. [For example: creator (publication year): Title, Publisher, identifier; see 

http://datacite.org/whycitedata and DOE's Data 10 Service.] 

Publishers could support the development of such a system by requiring that all data needed to 

reproduce the results and conclusions of a published scholarly article must be cited according to 

community standards. 

Funding agencies could support the development of such a system by recognizing data that has been 

archived and made available to the research community as "first class research objects" at the same 

level as articles. Agencies should also recognize any reuse of these data which could then be counted via 

citations. 

See the Australian National Data Center's "Building a Culture of Data Citation" poster available at 

http://ands.org.au/cite-data/index.html. 

For a hybrid example spanning the world of digital data and scholarly publication, see the Journal of 

Physical and Chemical Reference Data, a lang and successful collaboration between AlP and the National 

Institute of Standards and Technology. 

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Page 7 018 

Standards for Interoperability, Reuse and Re-Purpos;ng 

(10) What digital data standards would enable interoperability, reuse, and repurposing of digital 

scientific data? For example, MIAME (minimum information about a microarray experiment; see 

Brazma et a!., 2001, Nature Genetics 29, 371) is an example of a community-driven data standards 

effort. 

First, it is important to separate metadata standards from data format standards. Metadata standards 

could be developed that are lightweight enough to be widely interoperable and extensible so as to 

accommodate discipline-specific needs (within the XML publishing standard). These standards would 

need to cover both bibliographic information (data creator, date of creation, what the data describes, 

where it can be accessed, etc.), and how it was collected (experimental apparatus, experimental 

conditions, location, etc.). 

Data format standards that would enable reuse and repurposing would need to be developed at the 

discipline-specific level. There need not be one solution per discipline: it may be that the communities in 

question need a handful of solutions that correspond to the various types of data and/or modes of 

scientific research that produces the data. So while it is true that actual data solutions need to be 

discipline appropriate, there may be logical clusters of solutions for the connections between publishing 

and data depending on the nature of the data. 

There is a role for federal agencies in coordinating across discipline boundaries (covering all funded 

areas) and internationally. In its October 2011 report, Federal Engagement in Standards Activities ta 

Address National Priorities: Background and Propased Policy Recommendations, the Subcommittee on 

Standards of the National Science and Technology Council noted that "There was agreement among 

respondents that the US government should continue to play the role of participant in private sector 

standards setting processes. There was also general agreement that the effectiveness of government 

participation depends on the level and consistency of involvement and commitment of resources, both 

staff and budgetary, to the process. Lack of coordination among agencies ... was cited by many 

respondents as having a negative impact on government effectiveness." 

(11) What are other examples of standards development processes that were successful in producing 

effective standards and what characteristics of the process made these efforts successful? 

The Digital Object Identifier, or 001, is an example of a successful standard. Its development and 

adoption involved a multi-stakeholder, community-driven approach that solved a practical problem and 

provided benefit to the end-user. 

(12) How could Federal agencies promote effective coordination on digital data standards with other 

nations and international communities? 

AlP supports the recommendation of the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (lWGDD) that an 

NSTC Subcommittee for digital data preservation, access, and interoperability be created. This 

subcommittee would then be able to provide coordination among the US funding agencies and 

collaborate with its international counterparts. Coordination at the national level should extend beyond 

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Page8of8 

science funding agencies as relevant work is being done elsewhere within the US government (for 

example, the work of the library of Congress through its National Digital Information and Infrastructure 

Program [NDIIPj, particularly its "partnership with the National Science Foundation in 2005 to undertake 

a program of pioneering research to support advanced research into the long-term management of 

digital information"). 

In addition, this subcommittee could ensure that each Federal agency is itself required to adopt and 

implement digital data standards developed within the global community. 

Federal agencies can support conferences and other initiatives on a discipline level by funding standards 

and preservation work as well as pure research. 

(13) What policies, practices, and standards are needed to support linking between publications and 

associated data? 

See answer to question 9. The mechanism for linking between publications and associated data 

essentially exists with the digital object identifier, which is already used widely for linking between 

publications. The federal government could provide additional logistics and financial support for making 

this mechanism standard practice with respect to data and coordinating/aligning policies across federal 

agencies to encourage use of those standards by grantees. 

Agency involvement and/or support of current initiatives such as the NISO/NFAIS Working Group on 

Supplementary Journal Information (www.niso.org), which is working on recommended practices for 

publishers who are increasingly attaching data sets as supplementary information appended to 

publications, would also help address some of the issues at a practical level. 

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RESPONSE TO FEDERAL REGISTER NOTICE REQUEST FOR INFORMATION SUBMITTED BY

DR. CRISPIN TAYLOR
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January 12, 2012 Page 2 of 13 

Accepted articles are those that pass muster based on established criteria, including novelty and 

significance of the research findings. Managing peer review for ASPB's journals is a complex 

undertaking. It requires sophisticated electronic resources, associated support personnel, and help 

from thousands of referees. Each year ASPB makes such necessary investments to fulfill its public 

nonprofit mission, generating an intellectual return through the dissemination of scientific research. 

Introduction 

ASPB aims to achieve the widest possible dissemination of the research results it publishes in its 

journals. Enabled by Internet technologies, ASPB in 2012 disseminates more information, more 

widely and more affordably, than ever before in its history, This accomplishment requires heavy 

investments in technology and infrastructure (such as an online platform) and business acumen to 

develop sustainable free and low-cost access models, whether by pay-per-view, article rental, or as 

a benefit of membership. But it is not just the cost of producing the articles that is important in 

driving the development of novel business models; it is their value to the community. 

ASPB believes that it would be in the best interest of the United States government and all other 

stakeholders to strike a balance between public access and the needs and interests of the scholarly 

publishing industry because of the impact and value the latter brings to the progress of science and 

its contributions to American society and the national economy. Such a balance can be achieved 

based on shared principles, including the importance of peer review, the recognition of economic 

realities, the exploration and adoption of adaptable and viable publishing business models, the 

need to ensure secure long-term archiving and preservation of scholarly information, the increasing 

need to establish connections among disparate information sources and repositories online, and 

the desirability of broad access. One way to achieve this balance is for government to adopt a 

sensible, flexible, and cautious approach to drafting and revising public access policies-an 

approach that engages all concerned parties, including federal agencies, scientists, university 

administrators, librarians, publishers, and the public. 

Indeed, it is ASPB's position that government agencies should develop flexible public access policies 

through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders including researchers and 

publishers. Policies should be guided by the urgent need to foster interoperability of information 

across mUltiple databases and platforms. Agencies' efforts and resources could then be directed 

toward facilitating cyberinfrastructure and collaborative programs with and among agencies and 

other stakeholders to develop robust standards for the structure of full text and metadata, 

navigation tools, and other applications to achieve interoperability across the scholarly literature 

and other information sources. 

ASPS Responses to RFI Questions 

(1) Are there steps that agencies could take to grow the existing and new markets related to the 

access and analysis of peer-reviewed publications that result from federally funded scientific 

research? How can policies for archiving publications and making them publically accessible be 

used to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific enterprise? What are the 

relative costs and benefits of such policies? What type of access to these publications is required to 

maximize US economic growth and improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise? 

According to trade association and other industry surveys of US publishers, both the nonprofit and 

commercial sectors already serve a robust, innovative global market for the access and consumption 

of peer-reviewed publications. Academic, corporate, and governmental research and education 

communities constitute primary segments of the market. Global revenue from scholarly journal 

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publishing was estimated at $8.0 billion in 2008,.

2

, with approximately $3 billion attributed to the 

US market. The enterprise employs approximately 110,000 people worldwide, with 30,000 in the 

US. New publishers, journals, and business models evolve or emerge constantly, signaling a healthy, 

competitive marketplace. There is, to our knowledge, no evidence that the current system is in any 

way inimical to maximizing US economic growth, and there is no indication that the productivity of 

the American scientific enterprise is inhibited by it. So, ASPS's position is that there is no role or 

need for agencies to seek to grow existing or new markets related to peer-reviewed publications 

and no robust economic arguments for pursuing policies aimed at making articles publicly 

accessible. 

Indeed, the combination of investments in digital and online technologies (by publishers and 

others) and the formation of library consortia in the US and around the world has accelerated and 

broadened access to peer-reviewed literature, and it has dramatically decreased the cost of such 

access. ASPS currently serves over 2,000 research institutions, and every person affiliated with these 

institutions has instant access to ASPS journal content online. 

Furthermore, current conditions in the scholarly communications market already support a growing 

diversity of business models, as well as continuous innovation. It is our belief that the US 

government should support and encourage this diversity through its actions and policies, for 

example, by developing partnerships with publishers aimed at seeding further innovation and by 

providing funding support for experimental and innovative approaches toward increasing 

interoperability. (For more specific suggestions regarding partnerships and pilot projects that would 

meet mutually beneficial goals and conserve precious federal research funds for the agencies' 

primary mission of funding research, please see ASPS's responses to Question 5 later in this 

document. These recommendations for partnerships and pilot projects with federal agencies were 

developed in collaboration with a number of scientific publishers as we engaged over the past year 

in productive discussions with subject matter experts within the NSF and DOE, two US federal 

agencies that fund substantial research in the biological and physical sciences and engineering.) 

As stated in the 2010 Scholarly Publishing Roundtable report', many publishers have made the 

decision to move toward increasingly open structures and archives4 as enabled by Open Access 

business models and new solutions to associated permissions, such as Creative Commons' licenses. 

These licenses provide a means for exercising certain rights regarding the re-use of an item. For 

example, these licenses could provide reuse rights if the resulting new works are also made 

available to the public. The Roundtable Report also notes that the number of journals making a 

change in business model is appreciable but small within the universe of more than 25,000 

scholarly peer-reviewed journals6

. ASPS echoes the Roundtable Report assertion that no existing 

digital business model has demonstrated its viability to the satisfaction of all. and we caution 

against de facto government endorsement of any single approach. 

As part of the market's evolution and scholarly publishers' commitment to community and 

dissemination of peer-reviewed information, an increasing number of all types of journal publishers 

are electing to make their articles freely available to academics and others in 100 or more 

developing countries. Some well-known programs include the United Nations' HINARI, AGORA, 

and OARE Research4Life programs, in which ASPB's journals participate; HighWire Press's 

Developing Economies Program; and JSTOR's Developing Nations Initiative, in which the ASPB 

journals also participate. For descriptions of these and more, see 

www.library.yale.edu(~lIicense(develop.shtml. 

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To meet the market's increasing demand for easily accessible quality information, ASPB invests 

considerably in new technologies for viewing and sharing its journals. For example, within the past 

year, ASPB has deployed a mobile phone reader for Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell. Such 

ongoing investments in existing products and services and the development costs for new products 

are funded through subscription fees and author payments. ASPB and many other scholarly 

publishers offer an immediate free access option for authors, and ASPB's journal Plant Physiology 

currently offers this option at no cost to corresponding authors who are members of the Society. 

The ability for scientific publishers, large and small, for-profit and not-for-profit, to experiment with 

different publication, business, and access models is paramount and assures the vitality, diversity, 

and effectiveness of scholarly communication, leading to scientific and technological advances. 

Rather than mandate business models and de-incentivize market efficiencies, a more effective 

approach by government would be to incentivize the continued growth and vitality of the scholarly 

communication market for the benefit of the scholarly community and, in turn, the nation's 

competitive position. To that end, working with publishers, libraries, and other stakeholder 

communities, research agencies should identify specific needs of particular user groups and 

collaborate with publishers to meet those needs most effectively. Obviously, researchers, 

professionals, funders, and various segments of the general public (e.g., patients) have different 

information needs. ASPB is collaborating with other scholarly publishers to identify and address any 

existing access gaps through initiatives such as the low-cost article rental scheme pioneered by 

DeepDyve and the Research4Life consortium for developing countries (mentioned above). 

To maximize the effectiveness of its efforts, government does have an important role to play in 

convening stakeholders to develop standards for data and metadata, thereby helping to make 

research more readily searchable and discoverable. Publishers are already working in partnership to 

develop standardized information and collections through initiatives such as CrossRef'. 

With a relatively straightforward implementation of existing policy, government could make the 

funder-collected and maintained outputs of taxpayer-funded research, such as grant reports and 

research progress reports, freely available to the public"' Furthermore, to incentivize open access 

publishing, funds could be made available specifically to support payment for open access to 

published articles as pilot projects. Several research funders have already adopted this approach 

(e.g., Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, and Max-Planck Institutes). 

In the same vein, government funding could be provided to license content from publishers in 

order to make it available to specific audiences. (Publishers license content to customers of many 

kinds, including government agencies, and have the ability to ensure its continued availability with 

existing infrastructure.) 

ASPB has been a participant in working groups that are proposing and planning partnerships with 

NSF and DOE on access, linking of grantee reports to publications, data mining across agency and 

publisher databases, tools and methods for identifying publicly funded work, and potential pilot 

projects in these areas. 

Government mandates for public access come at a significant cost to the US economy and to the 

scientific enterprise. Data from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central (PMC) 

repository indicate that two-thirds of PMC's users are from overseas. This suggests that critical 

export opportunities for the industry may be compromised, potentially resulting in the loss of US 

jobs9 Significant economic value added by the publishing industry could be wasted if revenue 

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derived from sales in the global market is compromised or eliminated because mandates require 

that articles appear for free on government-owned or operated websites. ASPB is actively involved 

in efforts to grow its business in Europe, Asia (including China), Latin America, and here at home. 

Government mandates that would require the ASPB journals to post content for free under a 

limited embargo period are bound to cut into those efforts and harm the Society's mission -

including its capacity to continue to disseminate the peer-reviewed information published in its 

journals. 

PubMed Central adversely impacts the US scientific enterprise in another way: by consuming 

financial resources for a duplicative and unnecessary repository that might otherwise go toward 

directly supporting the scientific enterprise. 

In summary, ASPB believes that publishers should continue to be free to experiment with various 

business models in the marketplace of ideas and economics. ASPB endorses the Roundtable Report 

recommendation that" Agency policies should encourage the development, in a competitive 

landscape, of new value-added information products and services that take advantage of a 

scholarly environment in which articles are increasingly interoperable and available through licenses 

that support creative reuse. Such development should be carried out on a level playing field among 

all those who would devise such products and services." We believe that it is essential that any 

public access policies developed by the government do not undermine the ability of the market to 

create and sustain peer-reviewed journals. 

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, 

scientists, federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination 

of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research? 

Conversely, are there policies that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peerreviewed scholarly publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of 

publishers, scientists, federal agencies, and other stakeholders? 

ASPS and other scientific publishers rely heavily on the reputation of their journals to compete in 

the marketplace. Copyright protection reinforces the motivation for sustaining managed peer 

review, thereby protecting a journal's reputation. Any policy decisions regarding the publication 

and dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific 

research must respect US copyright law as it presently exists. Under the law, these works meet the 

criteria for copyright protection. It is a constitutional right granted to the copyright holder to 

exercise the exclusive rights attached to a work. In its role as the guardian of those rights, 

government must seek to strike the appropriate balance for all stakeholders through fair 

interpretation of the law. 

It is ASPS's position that agencies should provide free public access to final research reports and 

link them directly to any peer-reviewed journal articles that are derived from the funding regardless 

of the access mechanism via which those articles are available. This solution would drive the 

standardization of information reported on publicly funded research, promote rapid dissemination 

(rather than waiting for an article to be authored and subsequently peer reviewed), and ensure 

preservation of intellectual property rights, which provide the incentive for producing, distributing, 

and preserving all forms of intellectual property. 

ASPS encourages agency poliCies and actions that work to ensure copyrighted materials are 

protected from unauthorized dissemination and piracy. Copyright is an essential ingredient in 

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promoting creativity, innovation, and the continued integrity and reliability of the scholarly record. 

There is some evidence that the NIH policy undermines intellectual property rights and promotes 

piracy of intellectual property. As noted in response to Question 1, the NIH public access policy and 

availability of articles through NIH's database, PMC, undermine an important US export market. 

Furthermore, copyrighted material downloaded from PMC appears on rogue Internet sites, 

resulting in significant annual losses to US publishers. 

Nearly all scholarly publishers adopt liberal copyright policies, allowing authors to post copies of 

their manuscript on their individual and institutional websites with very little restriction, share 

copies with colleagues, and use their manuscripts for other educational and research purposes. 

Only commercial use is restricted and enforced by the industry. 

(3) What are the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized approaches to managing public 

access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded research in terms of 

interoperability, search, development of analytic tools, and other scientific and commercial 

opportunities? Are there reasons why a federal agency (or agencies) should maintain custody of all 

published content, and are there ways that the government can ensure long-term stewardship if 

content is distributed across multiple private sources? 

A defining feature of the Internet is that information is dispersed and widely distributed. It is, 

nevertheless, readily discoverable. So, although a centralized data platform may have some 

potential advantages related to simplicity of operation, the use of a centralized, governmentcontrolled platform for a large corpus of scholarly content has many significant downsides, not the 

least of which is increased and unnecessary costs to the government. A centralized approach 

discourages innovation by driving traffic away from innovators, including publishers, thus 

minimizing scientific and commercial opportunities. 

However, an important role for government in this arena would be to drive and fund the 

development of interoperability standards that would facilitate and enable ever richer connections 

among journal articles and other types of scholarly information available online and promote the 

widespread adoption and use of such standards. 

ASPB supports the recommendation of the Roundtable Report that states that government policies 

should be guided by the need to foster interoperability and encourage "additional multiagency 

programs supporting research and development to expand interoperabilitv capacity and to develop 

and promote additional interoperability practices and standards." The Roundtable Report further 

notes that the NSF, DOE, and other agencies provide important funding for the development of 

interoperability capacities through their cyberinfrastructure programs. 

In developing public access policies and procedures, agencies should carefully consider international 

cooperation with a larger vision that includes building standards and fostering distributed systems 

that are global in scope and go far beyond the work funded by US federal research dollars. In the 

Internet age, research and research resources are distributed globally. US federally funded research 

is only one part of the entire universe of information on any given topic, and in some disciplines, 

research is increasingly non-US government funded. A centralized repository such as PMC is not a 

model that is universally applicable or necessarily the best model for the future. Indeed, the success 

of the Internet is its evolving capability to connect an exponentially growing array of highly 

distributed information resources and databases. Any successful and optimized scientific publishing 

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system will incorporate effective incentives to implement and expand interoperability and reuse 

across internationally distributed databases. 

It is ASPB's position that stewardship of publications in the Internet age should be the collaborative 

responsibility of the publishing. librarv. and research communities. US government involvement in 

the long-term stewardship of publications is best addressed as part of the copyright system and 

through the Library of Congress digital preservation initiatives primarily as a promoter of standards, 

as noted above, and as one of many stewards of specific data platforms that need to be linked 

across public and private boundaries. 

What constitutes a publication and the nature of publication is changing with technology. A 

publication is no longer just a chunk of text fixed in time forever but a fluid representation. 

Publications can include supplemental material, multimedia files, software, and links to resources 

on the web and can be revised and corrected over time by the authors and publishers, hence the 

emergence of new community initiatives such as CrossRef's CrossMark'

° service, which electronically 

watermarks an article's Version of Record (VoR), and DataCite", which extends the CrossRefpromoted Digital Object Identifier (DOl) to datasets. Any plan for the future should recognize that 

the static aggregation/library model is not likely to hold up well in the distributed and dynamic 

Internet milieu. 

ASPB believes that it is unlikely that one optimal procedure for preservation and stewardship will 

emerge to become applicable across all of scholarly publishing. For now, ASPB strongly 

recommends that agency policies embrace diversity. decentralization, and interoperability. In the 

long term, systematic collaborations among stakeholders (government, publishers, universities and 

their libraries, and other not-for-profit participants in the scholarly publishing system) will be 

necessary to achieve maximum benefit. We note that libraries, in partnership with publishers, have 

established entities for preservation of digital documents that are already in wide use, for example, 

Portico 12 and CLOCKSS 13. 

Long-term stewardship of content comes at significant cost that is being borne by publishers and 

others. In an era of dwindling federal resources, central federal repositories are arguably 

duplicative, an unnecessary expense, and a recurring burden that may not be viable in the short or 

long term. Long-term stewardship might be more suitably carried out by the private sector or 

through collaborative stakeholder projects. There are productive ways to define appropriate roles of 

government and nongovernmental participants in the system, and ways that government agencies 

and nongovernmental stakeholders can collaborate as equal partners to their mutual benefit in 

strengthening the scholarly publishing system and expanding public access to its outputs. 

(4) Are there models or new ideas for public-private partnerships that take advantage of existing 

publisher archives and encourage innovation in accessibility and interoperability, while ensuring 

long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded research? 

Yes, please see detailed response to Question 5 below. 

(5) What steps can be taken by federal agencies, publishers, and/or scholarly and professional 

societies to encourage interoperable search, discovery, and analysis capacity across disciplines and 

archives? What are the minimum core metadata for scholarly publications that must be made 

available to the public to allow such capabilities? How should federal agencies make certain that 

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such minimum core metadata associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally 

funded scientific research are publicly available to ensure that these publications can be easily 

found and linked to federal science funding? 

To facilitate public access and drive and support scholarship, agency databases should be able to 

communicate with each other. Each agency's policies should include at least a minimal set of 

common core properties that promote access to and interoperability among the content in all 

public access databases. Specifically, ASPB encourages agencies to develop collaborations and 

partnerships with scientific publishers to develop and implement: 

Standards and persistent identifiers to enhance the discoverability of research results and to 

promote interoperability among agency, publisher, and any third-party databases and 

platforms; 

• Discovery tools to facilitate journal content mining; and 

• Pilot projects that would drive access, use, and innovation from research results. 

Specifics on these items are discussed below. 

Beyond common properties, agencies should have the flexibility to manage and modify their 

policies in response to evolving circumstances. Each agency should fully engage researchers, 

institutions, and publishers working in fields that coincide with that agency's missions, both in 

establishing initial public access policies and in modifying those policies as appropriate over time. 

Many scholarly publishing organizations, such as ASPB, were founded by scientists for scientists and 

fully embrace providing publishing and other services as their primary mission. As part of this 

objective, ASPB's executive director was an active member of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, 

and he has subsequently remained involved in working groups of nonprofit and commercial 

publishers that have proposed implementing joint projects with both the DOE and NSF with 

mutually agreed-upon goals. 

Standards and Identifiers: Agency Funding Information 

Most funding agencies currently require researchers to acknowledge in publications the support 

that they have received. There are no standards, however, on how this should be done. 

Consequently, agency funders find it difficult to know what publications have arisen from the 

research they have funded. ASPB supports the recommendation that publishers develop. in 

collaboration with funding agencies and CrossRef. means for standardizing funder information and 

making that information available to funding agencies and the public. We believe that a 

community-wide solution of this type will be easier and far less expensive to deliver than for each 

agency to develop its own response to the problem. This is because publishers are in the best 

position to provide a simple way of ensuring that journal articles are accompanied by standardized, 

high-quality metadata providing information about the agency, program, and even the specific 

grant that funded the research. It would be very expensive for agencies to obtain this information 

through data mining of existing publisher databases. 

This proposal has been endorsed by CrossRef and a number of major scientific, technical, and 

medical (STM) publishing trade associations, including the Professional and Scholarly Publications 

Division of the American Association of Publishers (PSP-AAP) and the International Association of 

Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers. Related to this proposal, the DOE's Office of Scientific 

and Technical Information (OSTI) has agreed to maintain a registry of standard nomenclature for 

funding agencies and the associated naming and numbering system for grants. OSTI already 

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houses technical reports and data sets for more than 40 federal and international funding 

organizations. 

With the successful implementation of this funding identity proposal by STM publishers, Cross Ref, 

and the DOE, agencies would have access to standard metadata from published articles. By 

displaying this information on agency websites, visitors-from the research community to the 

general public-could follow the link (enabled through the 001) to the publisher's platform where 

article abstracts are freely available and the full VoR (maintained by the publishers) is made 

available through a variety of access mechanisms, including innovative rental access models that 

give the public instant access for a modest fee. More than 40 scholarly publishers, including ASPB, 

are currently testing this particular access mechanism. 

Standards and Identifiers: Promoting Interoperability 

ASPB is seeking to collaborate with operators of a prominent knowledge base in plant biology that 

incorporates a rich array of genomic information from a wide variety of plant species to establish 

mechanisms for algorithmically connecting journal articles to database entries upon publication. 

Specifically, the collaborators propose to enable the retrieval of functional gene annotations and 

molecular annotations from ASPB journal articles using data-mining tools such as Textpresso'4 and 

BioCreative15, both of which make use of Natural Language Processing and are organized around 

robust and highly structured ontologies. The collaborators plan to create a reference library that 

includes known and predicted gene names, symbols, functions, phenotypes, and pathway 

annotations in three target plant species. Together with the ontologies, which will playa key role in 

structuring data annotation, the library will also help establish data capture architectures that the 

ASPB journals would implement with their authors as manuscripts are being submitted, thereby 

directly, immediately, and algorithmically connecting published journal articles with the underlying 

datasets and knowledgebase. Both collaborators envision developing proof-of-concept data-mining 

methodologies that would be broadly applicable in other fields of research. 

Standards and Identifiers: DOls for Data Sets and Supplementary Material 

Increasingly throughout the world, investigators are being asked to share or provide plans 

regarding how they will share with other researchers the primary data, samples, physical 

collections, and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of their work. 

Grantees are expected to encourage and facilitate such sharing. Scholarly publishers are already 

participating in a number of initiatives designed to facilitate the voluntary sharing of data or to 

foster interoperability among data sharing repositories, and they would be willing to work with 

NSF, DOE, and other database/repository operators to develop recommended practices for 

assigning DOls to data sets and supplementary material. 

For data policies, publishers would draw on their experience with initiatives such as Opportunities 

for Data Exchange (ODE; see www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/current-projects/ode), which aims 

to gather and promote best practices on the way scientific data are treated, and CoData, a partner 

of the International Council for Science (ICSU) World Data System (www.icsu-wds.orgl. The goals of 

the relatively new ICSU World Data System (WDS) are to create a global federated system of longterm data archives and data-related services covering a wide spectrum of natural sciences, thereby 

encouraging interdisciplinary scientific approaches. For supporting information, publishers would 

draw on their involvement with the joint NISO/NFAIS Working Group on Supplementary Journal 

Information (see www.niso.org). 

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Standards and Identifiers: Author Name Disambiguation 

Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems embedded in the scholarly 

research ecosystem. ASPS encourages all federal agencies to work in collaboration with publishers 

as well as universities funding organizations. and corporations from around the world to eliminate 

this problem through Open Researcher and Contributor 10 (ORCIO). ORCIO is a recently established 

nonprofit organization whose goal is to establish an open, independent registry of researchers that 

is adopted and embraced as an industry-wide standard to resolve systemic name ambiguity by 

means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research contributions. Researchers 

will be able to create, edit, and maintain an ORCIO 10 and profile free of charge and will define and 

control the privacy settings of their own ORCIO profile data. Participants expect that accurate 

identification of researchers and their work will facilitate emergence of new services and benefits 

for the research community by all types of stakeholders in scholarly communication, from 

commercial actors to nonprofit organizations, and from governments to universities. 

Discovery Tools: Content Mining 

Content mining can be especially useful to the scientific community in driving interdisciplinary 

research and supporting the identification of new areas of discovery, and publishers are committed 

to managing content in modern digital formats to ensure that users gain maximum benefit. 

Scholarly publishers should work with funding agencies to develop pilot projects for journal content 

mining that would create thesauri, perhaps building on the ontologies that are used to define 

architectures for some types of databases, using their expertise to identify, organize, and analyze 

content to create conceptual links within and between highly technical subject matter. Although 

there are various ways to perform this type of processing, certain elements are common to all 

methods, including an automated way to process all sizes and types of content in which to identify 

relevant information and facilitate its extraction and analysis. 

Such pilots should focus on goals such as the following: 

• Structuring input text, deriving patterns within the structured text, and evaluating and 

interpreting the output; 

• Extracting semantic entities from publisher content for the purpose of recognition and 

classification of the relations among them; and 

Enabling developers who wish to design and implement applications to analyze publishers' 

content, or test applications, as part of their research within publishers' content. 

Consensus approaches within the community could also be explored for developing better 

standardized, mining-friendly content formats, a shared content mining platform, and common 

permission rules for content mining. The Publishers Research Consortium recently completed an 

instructive study on article-level content mining based on a broad survey of ongoing or planned 

activities among nearly 30 STM publishers or associations (see 

www.publishingresearch.neVdocuments/PRCSmitJAMrepo rt2 OJune2 0 11 VersionofRecord. pdf). 

Pilot Projects: Sponsored Access to Published Research 

The "Gold" Open Access dissemination model, whereby an author or their institution pays an article 

processing charge to the publisher, delivers immediate and unrestricted online access to the VoR. 

ASPB suggests that agencies could work with publishers to set up experiments in specific scholarly 

communities to answer the following questions dealing with the cost. benefits. and sustainability of 

the Gold Open Access model. as well as investigate how such a model should be funded and 

administered: 

Response from the American Society of Plant Biologists to OSTP RFI (FR Doc No.2011-29623) 
176 

January 12, 2012 Page 11 of 13 

How much would it cost an agency to fund Gold Open Access in the aggregate and on a 

per-article basis? 

What is the most effective method to provide Gold Open Access funding for authors? The 

ability to use grant funds for sponsorship? A separate pool of funding reserved solely for 

Gold Open Access sponsorship? Other means? 

Should authors be required to expend grant funds on publishing articles derived from that 

funding? If not, how can authors be encouraged to utilize the available funds? 

How can agencies best administer a Gold Open Access program? 

• Does Gold Open Access offer agencies new opportunities to showcase the productivity of 

their funding activities to the American public and federal oversight committees? 

Pilot Projects: Unking to/from Research Reports 

ASPB encourages federal agencies to fund a pilot project that would seek to determine whether 

and how publisher content derived from agency-funded research could be mapped against agency 

research reports and other content. Specifically, the project might send users from publisher 

websites to the agency website to view free government-sponsored research reports and would, 

likewise, send users from the agency websites to publisher sites to view free abstracts and links to 

the VoR of articles connected to a particular research report or funded project. 

If successful, this would result in interoperability between online agency content and publisher 

platforms. This is of interest to scholarly publishers because they would like to work with major 

research funders to identify, organize, evaluate, and highlight published results from federally 

funded research, as well as identify relationships, projects, and offerings that might be applicable to 

other research funders. 

Possible outcomes of such a pilot might include: 

• The ability to identify all agency-funded research within publisher offerings and the ability 

to deliver associated metadata to agencies 

• The ability to establish mechanisms and approaches that could be implemented (for all 

research funders) across the industry 

A capability to report to major funders on the impact of the research they fund, for 

example, through bibliometric and other tools 

• A "research dashboard" capability or the ability to contribute to one already in existence, for 

example, http://rd-dashboard.nitrd.gov/ 

A mechanism for low-cost content rental access to the VoR of published articles and a 

mechanism to explore its impact 

• Subject area content portfolios of agency-funded research articles for internal agency use 

(e.g., study sections) 

• The possibility to use the DOE-OSTI platform (the http://www.science.gov) to extend this 

pilot to other federal funding agencies, and 

Models to illustrate how traditional publishing systems can coexist with self-archiving, 

including the posting of content on individuals' websites or in institutional repositories. 

(6) How can federal agencies that fund science maximize the benefit of public access policies to US 

taxpayers, and their investment in the peer-reviewed literature, while minimizing burden and costs 

for stakeholders, including awardee institutions, scientists, publishers, federal agencies, and 

libraries? 

Response from the American SOciety of Plant Biologists to OSTP RFI (FR Doc No.2011-29623) 
177 

January 12, 2012 Page 12 of 13 

An excellent mechanism to ensure public access to federally funded research results is by providing 

access to final agency reports. Every federally funded research project is required by law to provide 

a detailed final report. The research reports are a condition of the government contract. These 

reports should be archived and made accessible to the public. Some science funding agencies make 

these reports freely available via the web, others do not. Making all such reports available and 

accessible in a comprehensive and systematic way would solve an essential public access problem. 

One leading example is DOE's OSTI, which publishes final reports online in a portal called 

Information Bridge. These reports are not journal articles, but the final reports are often much 

longer than the resulting journal article (if such article exists-researchers typically publish only 

positive results and then have to meet the publication standards of the journals in their field), more 

timely, and provide more information. 

Moreover, NSF instituted a new reporting requirement as a result of specific legislation in the 

America COMPETES Act (Section 7010: Reporting of Research Results), which required that "all final 

project reports and citations of published research documents resulting from research funded in 

whole, or in part, by the Foundation, are made available to the public in a timely manner and in 

electronic form through the Foundation's Website." For several years, publishers have proposed 

working with authors to develop short abstracts for a lay audience to accompany each research 

report. 

Publishers are partnering with federal agencies to develop policies that maximize public access to 

research results and provide easy links between research reports (detailing research results, perhaps 

including lay summaries) and the peer-reviewed VoR, including complete access to the abstract or 

summary. Such projects would result in interoperability between funder and publisher content, 

ensuring access and better reporting on the results of funding. 

(7) Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting 

from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by 

these public access policies? 

No. Publishers also invest in these other types of content used by researchers, often by 

conceptualizing the project, commissioning the content, and investing heavily in its development. 

Any kind of mandated access to that content is an expropriation of that content. 

(8) What is the appropriate embargo period after publication before the public is granted free 

access to the full content of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded 

research? Please describe the empirical basis for the recommended embargo period. Analyses that 

weigh public and private benefits and account for external market factors, such as competition, 

price changes, library budgets, and other factors, will be particularly useful. Are there evidencebased arguments that can be made that the delay period should be different for specific disciplines 

or types of publications? 

There is no "appropriate" embargo period after publication before the public is granted free access 

to the peer reviewed scholarly publications. Embargo periods should be consistent with the mission 

and business needs of publishers. ASPB believes strongly that a uniform access policy or mandate 

for scholarly publications would be an ineffective aporoach. Any overarching government-wide 

policy or embargo period would fail to accommodate such key factors as the specific needs of any 

given agency, the rapidly changing nature of scholarly publishing, and the unique considerations of 

the various fields of science and the journals that serve them. 

Response from the American Society of Plant Biologists to OSTP RFI (FR Doc No.2011-29623) 
178 

January 12, 2012 Page 13 of 13 

References 

1 Cox, J. and L. Cox, Scholarly Publishing Practice: Academic Journals Publisher's Policies and 

Practices in Online Publishing, 3rd ed., ALPSP (2008), 

http://www.alpsp.org/Ebusiness/ProductCatalog/Product.aspx?1D=44. 

2 Outsell, "An Open Access Primer-Market Size and Trends" (2009), 

http://www.outsellinc.com/contact us/open access primer 2009. 

3 Report and Recommendations of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, January 2010, available at 

www.aau.edu/WorkArea/showcontent.aspx?id=10044. Referred to throughout this document as 

the Roundtable Report. 

4 Morris, S., Journal Authors' Rights: Perception and Reality (London: Publishing Research 

Consortium, 2009), http://www.publishingresearch.neVdocuments!JournaIAuthorsRights.pdf. 

5 Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/about) is a nonprofit corporation that provides 

free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to 

carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. 

6 Ware, Mark and Michael Mabe, The STM Report: An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Journals 

Publishing. September 2009. 

7 CrossRef (www.crossref.org) is a not-for-profit group founded by publishers in 2002 that now 

maintains 50 million items. Almost 1,000 publishers participate, assigning Digital Object Identifiers 

(Dais) to published content items. Development of the Cross Ref service has resulted in seamless 

navigation of the research literature by users so that researchers using the bibliography in one 

article can link from a reference to the full text of the referenced article. 

8 This would ensure readability to the broadest audience. NSF is already pursuing such a policy, see 

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/porfags.isp, and DOE through its Office of Scientific and 

Technical Information provides public access to nearly 300,000 DOE-funded research reports, see 

b1tQ)lwww.osti.gov/bridgel. 

9 See, e.g., 2009 U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) Factsheet. Available 

at http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/fact-sheets/2009/0ctober/us-china-joint-commissioncommerce-and-trade. 

10 CrossMark (www.crossmark.com) is a current pilot project of CrossRef to that will allow readers 

to easily determine whether they are looking at the publisher-maintained, stewarded version of a 

journal article. 

11 DataCite (http://datacite.org) is a not-for-profit organization established to facilitate easier access 

to research data on the Internet, increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable 

contributions to the scholarly record, and support data archiving that will permit results to be 

verified and re-purposed for future study. 

12 Portico (http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/) is a digital preservation service provided by 

a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the academic community use digital 

technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable 

ways. It is among the largest community-supported digital archives in the world, working with 

libraries, publishers, and funders to preserve e-journals, e-books, and other electronic scholarly 

content. 

13 CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not-for-profit joint venture between the world's leading 

scholarly publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically 

distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of web-based scholarly 

publications for the benefit of the greater global research community 

(http://www.clockss.org/ciockss/Home). 

14 http://www.textpresso.org/ 

15 http://biocreative.sourceforge.neV 

Response from the American Society of Plant Biologists to CSTP RFI (FR Doc No.2011-29623) 
179 

ALPSP RESPONSE TO OSTP REQUEST FOR INFORMATION

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers 

~hlti,(~ /he ! '1111/1'{' r/I..['drJfeJ am! PIY!fi>.UifiFtl/ P!f/;/id';I{~ ALPSP 

www.alpsp.org 

ALPSP Response to OSTP Request for Information: 

Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications 

Resulting from Federally Funded Research 

To: 

Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) 

publicaccess@ostp.gov 

From: 

Dr. Audrey McCulloch 

Acting Chief Executive 

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) 

15 Windmill Way 

Tring 

Herts HP23 4HQ 

United Kingdom 

audrey.mcculloch@alpsp.org 

January 2012 
180 

AlPSP RESPONSE: PUBLIC ACCESS TO PEER-REVIEWED SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS RESULTING FROM FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH 

ALPSP Response to OSTP Request for Information: 

Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting 

from Federally Funded Research 

1. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) is the 

international trade association representing scholarly and professional publishers 

across all academic disciplines. ALPSP has a broad and diverse membership of over 

300 organizations in 37 countries who publish over half the world's total active 

journals, as well as books, databases and other products. 

2. ALPSP's mission is to connect, train and inform the scholarly and professional 

publishing community and to play an active part in shaping the future of academic 

and scholarly communication. 

3. In the US, ALPSP represents 60 organizations in 14 states employing an estimated 

3,000 employees. 

4. ALPSP welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Office of Science and Technology 

Policy (OSTP) Request for Information on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly 

Publications Resulting from Federally Funded Research. Our response addresses issues 

relevant to the ALPSP membership. 

5. Scholarly publishing is an international enterprise, with around 1.5 million articles 

published annually1. US researchers dominate this output with a 29% share of the total. 

The majority of publishers (95%) are small, publishing one or two journals. At the 

other end of the scale, the 100 largest publishers account for 67% of the total number 

of journals. 

6. Publishers are dedicated to providing the widest dissemination of the peer-reviewed 

results of research and to supporting the SCientific enterprise. In addition to investing 

heavily in staff and technology, not-for-profit learned and professional society 

publishers redirect their 'surplus' back into the community through organization of 

conferences, scholarly awards, teaching fellowships, skills transfer through workshops 

and seminars, enhancing professional standards and benchmarking, travel and other 

grants, provision of patient information and public understanding of science initiatives. 

Commercial publishers also invest directly in the scientific community, through grants, 

awards and other sponsorship schemes. 

7. Publishers support any sustainable models of access, the most common being the 

subscription-based model. Gold Open Access, where the author (via the institution or 

funder) provides payment to fund publication, is gaining popularity, though it should be 

noted that this is not a fully tested model with regard to long-term sustainability. 

Publishers are working with funding organizations to investigate the issues surrounding 

this new access model to ensure it can provide sustainable business models for 

publishers to continue to disseminate value-added peer-reviewed literature. 

8. Policies which require open access publication but do not provide funding for that 

publication, such as Green Open Access (author self-archiving in openly accessible 

1 htto://www stm-assoc.orgiind!Jstry-statistics/the-stm-repQrtl 

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AlPSP RESPONSE: PUBLIC ACCESS To PEER-REVIEWED SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS RESULTING FROM FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH 

repositories) threatens to undermine the publication system on which it depends, as 

evidenced in a recent report from the Research Information Network2

• 

9. The PEER projece in Europe has been investigating the effects of large-scale, 

systematic deposit of the Accepted Manuscript (see NISO/ALPSP definitions for Journal 

Article Versions') in repositories. This project is a rational approach towards defining 

the problems and thereby identifying potential solutions. It is a broad ranging project 

encompassing economic, behavioral and usage aspects. The behavioral study has 

reported and noted that authors value highly peer-reviewed journals and whilst there is 

still some confusion regarding open access publishing, there were reservations about 

peer-reviewed papers being held in open-access repositories. It also found that readers 

were unlikely to go to a repository to search for journal articles. 

(I) Are there steps that agencies could take to grow existing and new markets 

related to the access and analysis of peer-reviewed publications that result from 

federally funded scientific research? How can policies for archiving publications 

and making them publically accessible be used to grow the economy and improve 

the productivity of the scientific enterprise? What are the relative costs and 

benefits of such policies? What type of access to these publications is required to 

maximize U.S. economic growth and improve the productivity of the American 

scientific enterprise? 

10. Current markets for peer-reviewed publications exist globally and publishers have 

invested heavily to ensure that there are many channels of access to publications. The 

markets are already well-served and a recent survey from the Publishing Research 

Consortium found that 97% of researchers in North America have very or fairly easy 

access to research journalss. This study also demonstrated that North America enjoys 

one of the best 'access to information' versus 'importance of that information' profiles of 

any of the regions investigated. 

11. Publishers have recognized the needs of the myriad communities they serve and have 

responded appropriately, leading the way with technical tools and services to enhance 

the access, usability and analysis of published research, collaborating widely with 

various stakeholders in the process. 

12. In this regard, a number of publisher-led initiatives have increased access to many 

different user groups. For example, DeepDyve6 , an article rental system, enables 

anyone to access thousands of scholarly and academic journals. Users may browse an 

article online and subsequently purchase the article for download if desired. 

patientINFORM7 brings up-to-date, authoritative information from the world's leading 

medical journals to patients and caregivers. Information is provided in a summarized 

form, with links to free or reduced-price access to the full article on the publisher 

website. The Emergency Access InitiativeS is a partnership between the Association of 

American Publishers (plus other publishers), the National Library of Medicine and the 

1 http://www.rin.ac. uk/news/press/heading -open -road-costs-and-benefits-transitions-schola rly-communications 

3 htto:/Iwww.oeeroroiect.eu/ 

4 http://www.niso.orgipublicationsirpi NISO RP-8-2008 Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the 

NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group 

5 http·l!www.publishingresearch.net/proiects.htm Access vs. Importance 

{; http./Iwww.deepdyve.com/ 

7 http://www.patientinform.org/ 

s http://eaLnlm.nih.govldocs/caotcha/test pPurl3 of 9 
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National Network of Libraries of Medicine with the aim of providing temporary and free 

access to those affected by disasters and those providing assistance to them. It includes 

public access. 

13. In addition to the collaborations in paragraph 12, publishers also provide free or very 

low cost access to universities and colleges, research institutes, schools, hospitals, 

governmental offices and national libraries in the lowest gross national income per 

capita countries throughout the world through initiatives such as Research4Life9 , eIFL'O 

and PERii". 

14. It is clear that publishers are keen to ensure that the needs of different markets in 

accessing scholarly information are met appropriately and are keen to do so in 

collaboration with other stakeholders. Publishers are keen to engage with the US 

Government to address the further gaps it has identified in public access. It would be 

useful for agencies to detail the particular needs of such user groups and to collaborate 

with publishers to establish the most efficient and appropriate ways in which to address 

those needs. 

15. The need for archiving digital information has been recognized by publishers, librarians, 

funders and researchers. Collaborative projects already exist to ensure the long term 

preservation of scholarly information through initiatives such as Portico12, LOCKSS13, 

CLOCKSS14 and the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) 

eDepot'5. 

16. Very careful consideration needs to be given to archiving and public access policies, if 

these are to be tied to growth in the US economy and improving output of the US 

scientific enterprise. Public access cannot be restricted to one local region. Ensuring 

public access to publications resulting from federally-funded research will result in 

global access, therefore benefiting researchers and other users all over the world (and 

potentially also their economies), not just the US. This removes any competitive 

advantage for the US economy and research output. 

17. Data from the National Institute of Health reports that more than half of all PubMed 

Central users are from outside the US. This repository is therefore reducing the export 

market for the US publishing industry which, in total, employs around 50,000 people 

and contributes c. US$3.5 billion to the US balance of trade. 

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests 

of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with 

the publication and dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications 

resulting from federally funded scientific research? Conversely, are there policies 

that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed 

scholarly publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of 

publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders? 

9 http://www,research4life.org/ 

10 http://www.em.netl 

11 http://www.inasp.info/ 

12 htto:!lwww.portico.org/digital-preservatiQn/ 

13 http://www [ockss org/lockss/Home 

14 http://www ,clockss.org/clockss/Home 

15 http://www.kb.nllindex-en.html 

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18. The US government is clearly aware that allowing global public access to the peerreviewed published output from federally-funded research has the potential to open 

such content to piracy and other unauthorized dissemination. 

19. Such piracy undermines the income that scholarly publishers require to continue their 

investment in the aforementioned projects, tools and collaborations for the benefit of 

the scholarly community. 

20. The most efficient way to ensure appropriate protection of intellectual property interests 

of all stakeholders would be to make the final Research Report, provided by the 

researcher to the funder, freely available. This would allow a rapid and very broad 

dissemination of the research results obtained directly from federal funding. This would 

also facilitate such reporting to be tied back to the original grant made by the federal 

agency. Final project reports could also be linked to the peer-reviewed published 

research, available online whether free, via rental or for full purchase as the publisher 

business model dictates. 

21. ALPSP is not in favor of mandated deposit to centralized open repositories. In addition 

to significant concerns about long-term sustainability and piracy, open repositories have 

deleterious effects on the publishing model; for example, NIH does not currently 

provide publishers with full, detailed usage statistics from PubMed Central, which means 

publishers are unable to supply libraries with the complete picture with regard to their 

institution's use of a wide range of journals. Such usage data is crucial in determining 

renewals and whilst this situation persists, subscriptions are being cancelled based on 

incomplete usage data. 

(3) What are the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized approaches to 

managing public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from 

federally funded research in terms of interoperability, search, development of 

analytic tools, and other scientific and commercial opportunities? Are there 

reasons why a Federal agency (or agencies) should maintain custody of all 

published content, and are there ways that the government can ensure long-term 

stewardship if content is distributed across multiple private sources? 

22. Studies have demonstrated that researchers prefer to access the publisher-created 

Version of Record (VoR) from a peer-reviewed journal as the authoritative, definitive 

verSion, over versions in subject or institutional repositories'6,17. 

23. In an interconnected age, with current and ever-improving technology, centralization is 

not required and moreover, requires unnecessary duplication of effort at considerable 

expense. Indeed the report from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable in January 2010'8 

recommended decentralization to achieve the interoperability needed to "enhance the 

impact of the scholarly literature and ignite the generation of new knowledge". 

24. Publishers have gone to conSiderable lengths in developing tools to ensure 

interoperability between different access systems. For example the Digital Object 

Identifier (DOI'9) system, to provide persistent identification of digital objects, the 

iti httD:llwww,peerproject,eu/reports/ D4.2 PEER Behavioural Research -- Final Report 

17 http://wwwpublishingresearch.net/orojects.htm Research Publication Characteristics and Their Relative Values 

18 http://www .aau .edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id -10044 

19 http.!/www.doi.org 

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CrossRef 20 organization and its various ongoing projects aimed at connecting users 

with primary research content, and the Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID21 ) 

initiative, to solve author name ambiguity in scholarly communications and latterly 

resolving institutional naming ambiguity. 

25. Publishers are also continuing to invest in the development of discipline-specific tools to 

enable users to interact with and analyze specialized content. Such tools would be lost 

with centralization. 

26. Publishers are continuing to invest in metadata standards, which improve the ease with 

which relevant articles can be discovered. With such excellent standards, search tools 

are all that is required to connect users with the most appropriate content for their 

needs, and importantly to the VoR. Such metadata standards include those developed 

by EDltEUR22, IDEAliiance (PRISM)23 and NIS024 (see also paragraphs 33 and 34 

below). 

(4) Are there models or new ideas for public-private partnerships that take 

advantage of existing publisher archives and encourage innovation in accessibility 

and interoperability, while ensuring long-term stewardship of the results of 

federally funded research? 

27. In addition to the many public-private partnerships already mentioned, publishers are 

keen to engage further with Government and its agencies. Proposals have already been 

put to NSF for collaborative projects to enhance the public access, utility and 

preservation of publications resulting from federally-funded research. 

28. Such proposals include standardizing the collection, display and use of metadata to 

indicate the federal grant supporting the research from which a scholarly publication 

derived and potential linking back to the Federal Agency website. A further example is 

the proposal for a project to understand the requirements for and benefits derived from 

content mining and to establish a methodology for overcoming current barriers, such 

that publishers can facilitate such content mining with sustainable business models. 

29. These are just two of the proposals under discussion with the NSF. 

(5) What steps can be taken by Federal agencies, publishers, and/or scholarly and 

professional societies to encourage interoperable search, discovery, and analysis 

capacity across disciplines and archives? What are the minimum core metadata for 

scholarly publications that must be made available to the public to allow such 

capabilities? How should Federal agencies make certain that such minimum core 

metadata associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally 

funded scientific research are publicly available to ensure that these publications 

can be easily found and linked to Federal science funding? 

30. As already mentioned above (paragraph 28), publishers are already undertaking a 

project with Cross Ref and the Department of Energy (DoE) to standardize the way 

2°http://www,crossref org 

21 httD:/lorcid,org 

22 htto:llwww.edlteur.ora/ 

23 http://www . idea!1 ia nee. org/specifications/prism/ 

24 http://www.niso.Qrg/standards/ 

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funding information is collected publishers and included in article metadata. This would 

enable Federal agencies to easily obtain information about publications resulting from 

federally-funded research. 

31. Such collaborative projects enable cost-effective standardization across all Federal 

agencies and publishers. 

32. Metadata allows users to discover information and find related information without the 

requirement of accessing the full text. Two initiatives are important in this regard. 

33. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative25 provides key specifications and best practice 

regarding the use of metadata for the description of various digital resources (including 

books and journal articles). It enables interoperability of different applications and 

vocabularies and optimizes the metadata for searching. 

34. CrossRef2o provides a cross-publisher linking network. This allows readers to easily link 

to other resources of interest on other publisher platforms. This works seamlessly 

through DOIs and metadata which are embedded in articles and other content as part 

of the value-added publication process. 

(6) How can Federal agencies that fund science maximize the benefit of public 

access policies to U.S. taxpayers, and their investment in the peer-reviewed 

literature, while minimizing burden and costs for stakeholders, including awardee 

institutions, scientists, publishers, Federal agencies, and libraries? 

35. Federal agencies funding scientific research should maximize the products that they 

invest in, that is the Research Reports required by Federal agencies from the research 

scientist. Some already make such research reports available (e.g. the DoE Information 

Bridge26), but others do not. Making all such reports freely available would solve the 

"public access" issue. 

36. Federal agencies do not invest in peer-reviewed journals. Publishers add significant 

value to peer-reviewed publications and this is reflected in researcher preference for the 

VORI6,17, Publishers should then be at liberty to employ appropriate business models by 

which they may recover their investment and to reinvest, 

(7) Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer-reviewed 

publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and 

conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies? 

37. No. Publishers invest considerably in all types of content they produce to add value to 

the scholarly and academic community that utilize them. Such publications should not 

be appropriated without rightsholder permission and compensation. To behave 

otherwise would compromise the sustainability of high quality publication, dissemination 

and preservation of the research results. 

25 http://dublincore&rgL 

26 http-j/www osti gov/bridge/ 

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(8) What is the appropriate embargo period after publication before the public is 

granted free access to the full content of peer-reviewed scholarly publications 

resulting from federally funded research? Please describe the empirical basis for 

the recommended embargo period. Analyses that weigh public and private 

benefits and account for external market factors, such as competition, price 

changes, library budgets, and other factors, will be particularly useful. Are there 

evidence-based arguments that can be made that the delay period should be 

different for specific disciplines or types of publications? 

38. There is no single "appropriate" embargo period. Federal agencies should not impose 

inappropriate embargo periods on non-federally funded businesses. Individual 

publisher business models are not arbitrary, but are carefully calibrated to meet the 

needs of the market and the investment made. 

39. The most common current embargoes range from zero, for gold Open Access material, 

to 12 months, as a result of the NIH-mandate. Publishers, however, should be able to 

set their own appropriate embargo, depending on the material they publish and the 

market for which they publish, and this may be more or less than 12 months. 

40. An indication of the length of usage an article in a given discipline received, the journal 

half-life forms a useful measure. For example, the American Physiological Society 

reports journal half-life from 4.3 to over 10 years27. The quarterly journals of the 

American Anthropological Association also have a cited half-life of over 10 years and 

90% of downloads occur 12 months after the date of publication. In mathematics 

papers published in 2009, 50% of citations were found to be to papers originally 

published before 1999, with 20% of citations to papers published before 198528. 

41. Imposing mandates on the potential to recover investment from such usage further 

undermines publishers' ability to continue to innovate and add value for the benefit of 

the scholarly and academic community. 

42. In the current economic climate, recovering investment is all too important. Journal 

budgets are being squeezed and foreshortening the length of time a publisher is able to 

recoup their investment has the potential to seriously damage publishers and therefore 

the overall economy. 

43. As already referred to, the lack of transparency demonstrated by NIH has the potential 

to undermining the entire system. Librarians utilize usage statistics as part of their 

conSiderations for journal renewals. Whilst publishers have worked with NIH to assist 

authors in fulfilling their mandated deposit, NIH has been unwilling to provide 

publishers with detailed usage statistiCS, which would allow publishers to provide a 

more accurate picture to librarians of the usage of journals by their faculty. 

Please identify any other items the Task Force might consider for Federal policies 

related to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from 

federally supported research. 

27 http://www.the-aps.org/publications/iournals/infolimpactfactors.htm 

28 http://www.msrLorglattachmentslworkshopsI587IMSRlfinalreDort.pdf Donald E McClure (2011) DynamiCS of 

Mathematics Journals, 2000 to 2009 

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ALPSP RESPONSE: PUBl1C ACCESS TO PEER-REVIEWED SCHOLARLY PUBl1CATIONS RESULTING FROM FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH 

44. Scientific research and scholarly communication is an international enterprise. Any 

efforts to improve "public" access through collaborations, standards or other projects, 

should necessarily be considered on an international, rather than national scale, if the 

real benefits of improving access to data are to be efficiently and cost-effectively 

recognized. 

45. Publishers are very willing to enter into collaborative projects to explore the nature of 

these issues with the aim of producing the most cost-effective and appropriate solutions 

for all stakeholders. 

Dr. Audrey McCulloch 

Acting Chief Executive 

On behalf of the ALPSP membership. 

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