The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) proposes to mandate that
all federally funded researchers must make all their research journal
articles reporting federally funded research openly accessible (OA) to all
users by self-archiving them free for all on the web within 6 months of
publication.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-02-06.htm#frpaa
Peter Suber has announced in OA News, that a publisher (Springer) has
recommended to the sponsors of the FRPAA that because a 6-month embargo on
self-archiving is too long for researchers and too short for publishers,
the FRPAA should instead mandate immediate self-archiving and pay the
publisher to do it. The recommendation does not mention the amount that
the publisher should be paid, but currently publishers are charging
between $500 and $3000 or more for making articles OA (Springer charges
$3000).
I would like to make some comments on this suggestion. Please note that
they contain some nested contingencies:
(1) If the federal funding agencies have the extra cash, and
are willing to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today
(or to impose a capped amount of their own), and the FRPAA can be
successfully passed as an immediate-OA mandate in this way, this
would be a perfectly fine outcome -- acceptable to research and
researchers as well as to publishers.
(2) If, however, the federal funding agencies do not have the extra
cash to pay publishers the amount they ask today (or an acceptable
capped amount), and/or if the FRPAA cannot be successful enacted
into law if burdened with a commitment to pay publishers the amount
they ask today (or an acceptable capped amount) for OA, then the
suggestion that FRPAA should be revised to do so is just another
way to delay or doom the passage of the FRPAA.
(3) The present version of the FRPAA does not propose to pay anyone
anything: it merely mandates that federally funded research must be
made OA by the fundee, by self-archiving it, within (at most) 6 months
of publication, in the fundee's own institutional repository (or a
central one).
(4) To date there is no evidence at all that self-archiving reduces
publisher subscription revenues; and the two publishers whose authors
have been self-archiving the longest and the most, the American
Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, both report that they
have (4a) no detectable subscription declines and are (4b) unopposed
to an immediate (no-embargo) OA self-archiving mandate.
(5) The objective, empirical way to test whether there is any truth
to other publishers' hypothesis that self-archiving will reduce
subscription revenue -- and the only way to find out how much and how
fast it would reduce subscription revenue if ever it did so at all -- is
to adopt the FRPAA and to monitor its outcome annually, making further
adjustments only as and when there is evidence that they are necessary.
(6) It is true that a 6-month embargo is bad for research; but
an interim way to minimize that damage to research is to require
immediate deposit and to allow only the date at which access to the
deposited full text is set to Open Access (OA) to be delayed (for up
to 6 months) where necessary (Closed Access until then).
(7) 94% of journals already endorse setting access immediately to OA.
(8) For the remaining 6% of articles set to Closed Access, the
article's bibliographic metadata will still be visible to all
immediately, and the self-archiving repository software provides a
semi-automatic feature for individual would-be users to request -- and
authors to provide -- an individual eprint of the full text by email.
(9) This immediate-deposit/delayed-OA compromise is the preferable
one if the federal funding agencies do not have the extra cash,
or are unwilling to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today
(or to impose a capped amount of their own).
(10) At the moment, institutional subscriptions are paying the costs of
peer review. If/when subscription revenues were indeed ever to decline
to unsustainable levels because of institutional cancellations, the
institutional windfall savings from the cancellations would themselves
be a natural candidate source for covering the peer-review costs of
the institution's own researchers, rather than any arbitrary amount
requested from federal research funders today -- especially as
subscription decline would first generate pressure toward publisher
cost-cutting, downsizing and readjustment to the new reality of OA
publishing, and hence a more realistic, market-driven figure for the
true costs of peer review (which publishers manage, but researchers
themselves perform for free).
Stevan Harnad
> Springer's unexpected response to FRPAA
>
> I've learned --and Jan Velterop has confirmed-- that Springer has sent
> a letter to Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate committee
> considering FRPAA, raising an unusual objection to the six-month
> embargo allowed by the bill. The letter argues that six months is too
> short to satisfy publishers and too long to satisfy researchers. In
> its place, Springer proposes a policy that would require full-text
> open access immediately upon publication --provided that the policy
> makes clear that publishing in peer-reviewed journals is an
> inseparable part of research and therefore that the funds for doing so
> (article processing fees) will be available to researchers as a
> special overhead on their publicly-funded research grants. The letter
> proposes that the new policy might be phased in after a short grace
> period to give publishers a chance to modify their business models.
>
> Permanent link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 6/14/2006 12:54:00 PM.
>
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_11_fosblogarchive.html#115025133781474470
>
Received on Thu Jun 15 2006 - 16:08:49 BST