Open Access Bill Advances despite Publisher Protests

Free public access to all published articles produced from National Institutes of Health-funded research moved one step closer to reality last week. The bill, pushed by a coalition of more than 200 academic libraries, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and many academic societies, was included in the Labor-Health and Human Services appropriations bill that overwhelmingly passed the Senate. The House has already passed a similar measure. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill for other reasons.

Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition of the Association of Research Libraries, hailed the Senate vote, which would vastly expand the content in NIH’s free library at PubMedCentral. "This policy sets the stage for researchers, patients, and the general public to benefit in new and important ways from our collective investment in critical biomedical research," she said. The provision was opposed by the Association of American Publishers, which includes leading scientific publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society, which claim their ability to support independent peer review of new studies depends on exclusive copyrights.

The publishers' campaign triggered an anonymous email campaign by an ACS insider that accused the chemical society's leaders of opposing the provision because their high salaries and bonuses are tied to publishing profits, The Scientist reported. Several top officials at ACS, which generates about a half a billion dollars a year in revenues from its 36 journals, earn over $750,000 a year, according to its latest Internal Revenue Service filings. The anonymous emailer's allegations drew an angry open letter from ACS chairwoman Judith L. Benham, who wrote that "the ACS's position on open access has been developed carefully over many years, in consultation with scientists and publishing experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines and interests."

ACS belongs to the Association of American Publishers, which earlier this year hired Dezenhall Resources, best known for defending Enron executives and opposing public interest groups, to launch a campaign opposing the open access legislation. In August, AAP launched a new website called Prism (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine) that echoed the claim that open access would undermine peer review. That sparked James D. Jordan, president of Columbia University Press, to resign from AAP. Stephen Bourne, chief executive officer of Cambridge University Press told The Chronicle of Higher Education that "Prism's message is oversimplistic and ill-judged, with the unwelcome consequence of creating tension between the publishing community and the proponents of open access."

The preceding appeared first in Integrity in Science Watch, a publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.