CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — I’m here at the annual meeting of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, where I gave the opening keynote. I’m not going to dwell on my presentation, though, I’d much rather share some of the things I have learned so far during my time here.

One hot topic of discussion here was the new policy put in place last year by the National Institutes of Health, under permission given by congressional appropriators without involvement of key authorizing committees, that requires publishers to hand over papers authored by researchers who received at least some NIH funding so that those papers could be published for free (public access) on NIH’s web site. These papers are handed over after the journal-sponsored peer review process and are posted by NIH a few months after journal publication.

In essence, by not taking the research works after they are written, NIH is outsourcing quality control to publishers against their will and at no compensation, and then adding insult to injury by making the publishers compete against free versions of the works they shepherded along.

This issue isn’t new, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers (D-Mich.) an a bipartisan group of committee members have introduced legislation to reverse this. But the debate generally centers around for-profit publishers. Many in the digital commons movement take umbrage at for-profit institutions. But half of scientific journals published today are in fact products of scientific societies. Their peer-reviewed journals support the many other activities of the society.

Karen Butter, University Librarian and Assistant Vice Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, expressed in her presentation here some sympathy with the public access movement, and that is not necessarily surprising. But I was struck by the results of a very informal study she conducted of users of the NIH PubMed system. She acknowledged that her voluntary-response study likely was biased toward those who favored public access, and in fact a majority of respondents did. But a healthy minority — including some who favored public access overall — acknowledged that mandating free publication could harm publishers and societies. They want the journals to continue to operate, and they want to continue to receive the benefits of society membership.

It’s the Game Theory problem that occurs so frequently with copyright, where what benefits you — getting something for free — could on a macro level cause great harm and reduce your access to the goods down the road.

So if half of all scientific journals are published by societies, and societies rely on journal subscriptions to cover operating costs, and those subscriptions and one-time digital purchases are reduced because of competing with their own published articles in free form, what can societies do to survive? After all, in this “code is law” world, aren’t we told that if your business model is taken away because others want access to your work in a way you haven’t authorized, you have to adjust?

Reed Elfenbein, Vice President and Director of Sales and Marketing for Wiley-Blackwell had some suggestions. First, she is a big proponent of open access publishing, and made it clear that access controls need to go the way of the dodo bird. (She didn’t address the public access issue as much, even though that was the topic of her panel and they are in fact two different things.) Elfenbein walked conference attendees through various funding scenarios, all of which had upsides and drawbacks.

Some models in the open access world, such as the author/funder model where the costs are borne by the author, don’t provide the revenue stream the society would need. Another approach would be ad-supported publishing, but she acknowledged that when one is talking about scientific research, there is great sensitivity about having sponso

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 2:03 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under capitol hill, licensing, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.