- Email: [email protected]
An Interview with Heather Joseph
Serial Conversations An Interview with Heather Joseph Mary Page, Contributor Bonnie Parks, Column Editor
Heather Joseph talks about her career with SPARC and BioOne. She discusses the NIH mandate that NIH-funded research will be deposited into PubMed Central, and she shares her views on some of the controversial issues the mandate has raised about copyright, peer review, and embargo periods. She also addresses the recent decision by the Harvard faculty to make their scholarly output accessible through the university’s institutional repository, and she suggests ways that librarians can help their faculties prepare for open access. Serials Review 2008; 34:154–157.
spread adoption of open access to scholarly research; identifies and negotiates partnerships with scholarly publishers; builds coalitions of support; and generally represents the interests and values of SPARC to the stakeholders in scholarly communication. Before coming to SPARC, Heather served as the president and chief operating officer of BioOne, a SPARC publisher partner. Under her leadership, BioOne helped small scholarly societies in the biological sciences maintain their independence while bringing their publications online. For her work in successfully launching and establishing BioOne, Heather was awarded the 2002 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ award for services to not-for-profit publishing. She also served as elected president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing for the 2004–2005 term. In this interview, Heather Joseph discusses her career and what led her to SPARC and BioOne. She also discusses the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate that NIH-funded research will be deposited into PubMed Central, and she shares her views on some of the controversial issues it has raised about copyright, peer review, and embargo periods. She addresses the recent decision by the Harvard faculty to make their publications openly accessible through Harvard’s institutional repository and why this decision and the NIH mandate are compatible. Finally, Heather Joseph has suggestions for ways that librarians can help their faculties prepare for the implementation of the NIH public access mandate.
Introduction Heather Joseph is a respected authority on scholarly communication issues, and more recently, she has become well known for her efforts within the open access movement. Her work is informed by her extensive experience in the scholarly publishing industry. Currently, Heather is the executive director of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. She leads SPARC’s advocacy efforts to support widePage is Head of Acquisitions, Rutgers University Libraries, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA; email: [email protected]. Parks is Technology and Catalog Librarian, W.W. Clark Memorial Library, University of Portland, Portland, OR 97203, USA; email: [email protected].
Mary Page (MP): Everyone knows you through SPARC and ARL. Could you tell us about your career before ARL, and how you began working with serials?
doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2008.03.003
154
Parks / Serials Review 34 (2008) 154–157
Heather Joseph (HJ): I watched the movie All the Presidents Men one too many times as a teenager and started out studying journalism at American University here in Washington, DC. I originally thought I wanted to be a reporter, but my degree work, along with an internship at a start-up weekly newspaper here in the city, taught me two things: first, I hated to ask people questions that they didn’t particularly want to answer; and second, I found the business of publishing much more interesting than I’d ever imagined. I wanted to get an MBA to learn more about how to do this, so I searched for a job that would help out with tuition and let me keep a hand in the publishing arena. I was fortunate enough to find the perfect position with the American Astronomical Society (AAS). It was my introduction to the world of scholarly publication and scientific journals, and I could not have possibly landed in a better place at a better time. When I started there in 1990, the Web and e-mail were not yet ubiquitous, but because many of the AAS members worked in physics and related disciplines, they were early users of ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. The AAS had an e-mail account, so my introduction to the world of scholarly journals was inextricably linked to my introduction with networked communications. Talk about imprinting! From day one, I remember the members asking questions like, “When are you going to learn to take our meeting abstracts electronically?” and “you all should figure out a way for us to send in our journal articles over e-mail.” It was a constant chorus of questions that have evolved throughout the past eighteen years of working primarily in the scholarly society publishing arena.
advocacy—and we work hard to keep vibrant efforts moving in each of these areas simultaneously. For example, we’ve created an extremely robust educational campaign around open access: introducing open access as a concept, outlining potential mechanisms to implement it, and providing resources for spreading the word. But along with the educational efforts, we also make sure that we put resources into incubating various open access business models, as well advocating vigorously for public policies that create an environment in which open access can thrive. Certainly the advocacy work that SPARC has been deeply engaged in, particularly in calling for public access to the results of federally funded research, have been quite effective. As for SPARC endeavors that weren’t quite the successes we’d hoped, I’d say the lessons center mainly around issues of scale. For example, one of our earliest programs was an effort to introduce lower-priced journals into the marketplace to compete directly with extremely high-priced titles—an effort to infuse an element of competition into the journal market. While SPARC was successful in helping to shepherd a number of such titles to market, I couldn’t honestly say that the overall impact was what we’d originally hoped for. But again, I think that’s largely an issue of scale—the overhead and resources needed to introduce new titles in the numbers that would be needed to truly begin to bring prices down systemwide are quite significant.
MP: SPARC was launched in 1998. Can you talk about some of its accomplishments? Can you talk about any SPARC undertakings that weren’t successful?
HJ: On the one hand, I completely understand that SPARC’s alternative titles can be looked at as just an added expense. But I think we have to take the big picture approach and understand that the introduction of these titles served a crucial purpose. They gave notice that the library community was serious about its message that business as usual would no longer be an option and that the community was more than capable of enlisting the support and partnership of researchers, authors, and editors who agreed that publishing models needed to change. SPARC alternative journals were, and are, a very real investment in our ability to marshal real resources and develop viable alternatives within the scholarly publishing system. They are an important demonstration of libraries “walking the walk” as well as “talking the talk” about change. And, not inconsequentially, the SPARC alternative journals have made progress establishing high-quality status in terms of impact factors, as well as helping to moderate price increases with the journals with which they directly compete.
MP: How do you respond to critics who say that they have to subscribe to both the SPARC title and the commercial title it’s competing with?
HJ: My introduction to SPARC came in 2000, when I was hired to launch BioOne. As you know, this SPARC initiative raised money from the library community, invested it in non-profit publishers specifically to convert their journals from print to electronic format, and created an online platform to deliver their content as widely as possible. We started out working with just thirty-seven titles: BioOne has thrived and now provides its service to more than 140 journals. Online journal publishing has certainly been one of SPARC’s major success stories. On a broader scale, I think that one central contribution of SPARC has been raising the profile of scholarly communications issues. The issue has expanded from a library-centric issue of “journals cost too much” into a conversation about leveraging new opportunities to expand the scope of dissemination of the results of science, research, and scholarship. It involves not just the library community, but also researchers and the academy, as well as national and international policymakers. The issue of access to and use of scholarly output has become one of great public interest. One key to SPARC’s ability to produce successful outcomes is its operating structure—we have three distinct program areas—education, incubation, and
MP: SPARC has become a mature organization with a well-defined mission and record of success. How do you see its future development? HJ: With the community’s strong support, SPARC has grown considerably over the past ten years, which is
155
Parks / Serials Review 34 (2008) 154–157
immensely encouraging. Besides deepening our presence and programs in the US and in Canada, where SPARC was first established, we’ve grown considerably in our international presence. SPARC Europe has become a well-established, well-respected presence in Europe, and plays a crucial role in advocacy and education efforts, especially on open access and related topics. SPARC Japan, our most recent endeavor, is beginning to make its mark on issues relating to scholarly publishing. We fully expect that our opportunities to work collaboratively will expand as each organization increases it capacity in its own regions, and we look forward to widening the circle of partners. We think there’s tremendous opportunity to do this not only geographically, but also in terms of partnering with new constituencies.
two ways. First is the concern that somehow the NIH policy will force large scale changes in the economics of how journals are currently supported. Presumably, the concern is that the NIH policy will lead to immediate, widespread cancellations of journal subscriptions by libraries, which represent the lion’s share of revenue for most journal publishers. This will lead to a dramatic reduction in the revenue that publishers currently have to allocate to the administration of the peer review system. Of course, most libraries will not cancel a journal simply because some subset of its articles appears a year later in PubMed Central. Libraries base cancellation decisions largely on a combination of the criteria of price, demand by faculty, and availability of funds. They are far more likely to cancel a journal because of a price increase implemented by a publisher or a budget cut imposed by an institution than on the availability of some of the content in another source. The second iteration of the peer review argument that I have seen notes that if NIH-funded articles are now routinely collected into a database that is administered by a government agency, the government will somehow then consider itself as playing an active role in the overall publishing process and will change the current peer review process in a way that will undermine its integrity. This is, of course, not the intention of the NIH policy, which neither stipulates nor encourages such a change in the government’s role. The NIH policy will not have any direct effect on the current system of peer review. Peer review will continue to be carried out voluntarily by researchers, because it is a key responsibility of contributing members of the scientific research community.
MP: Let’s talk about the recent National Institutes of Health mandate that all NIH-funded research will be deposited into PubMed Central.1 Is this a defining moment for the open access movement? HJ: I think it is. The debate and discussion on this particular policy played out very publicly over the past several years. Interest wasn’t just limited to the academy and trade publications; the level of coverage by the popular press highlighted how closely the world was following this issue. The fact that Congress signed this policy into law imbues a significance that cannot be overstated. This isn’t simply an interesting proposal by one special interest group: this is a fully vetted, thoroughly discussed policy that is now the law of the land. Certainly that represents a watershed moment for open access, and it has implications far beyond a single government agency in the United States.
MP: Are you satisfied with the twelve-month embargo? Is there interest in shortening the embargo period or eliminating it completely?
MP: Publisher groups have stated that the NIH mandate infringes on their copyrights. Is that true?
HJ: The concerns of those who think that twelve months is too long an embargo period completely resonate with me, but from a pragmatic standpoint this was a necessary compromise. The NIH policy represents a sea change in the parameters of the scholarly communications marketplace. With this policy we’ve leapfrogged from information being locked up behind exclusive distribution licenses perpetually to an embargo period limited to no longer than one single year. That’s an enormous step forward. Also, the policy allows the researcher to determine the embargo period. Remember, this is not a static twelvemonth requirement; it calls for NIH-funded articles to be made publicly available “no longer than twelve months after the official date of publication.”3 This gives the power to the research community to determine what is best in terms of the timing of an article’s accessibility.
HJ: No. There is nothing in the policy that inherently conflicts with, undermines, or threatens copyright. The policy is concerned with contract terms, not copyright exceptions. The proposed provision simply provides that in exchange for public funding, investigators must deposit copies of articles resulting from that funding into PubMed Central so that they are available to the public. It’s simply incorrect to say that the NIH policy, as required by Congress, requires a violation of copyright. In fact, it requires compliance with copyright. Congress includes a proviso to the language in the bill’s text that specifically reads: “Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.”2 MP: Another concern is peer review. How will the NIH mandate affect peer review?
MP: How would you respond to a researcher who deposits his work in his institutional repository where it will be freely available? Why does he have to deposit it into PubMed Central as well?
HJ: The notion that the NIH public access policy will somehow negatively affect the system of peer review has got to be the single most oft-repeated misconception about the NIH policy (and in fact, public access policies in general) that I’ve run across. I’ve seen it presented in
HJ: First of all, I applaud researchers who take the critical step of ensuring broad access to their work by placing it in
156
Parks / Serials Review 34 (2008) 154–157
an institutional repository. They clearly understand the value of sharing their material so that it can be built upon by their colleagues. For those researchers, the transfer of a copy of that material into PubMed Central should be a fairly trivial process. They’ve already got the manuscript prepared, and the NIH has found that it takes a researcher less than ten minutes on average to deposit a manuscript using their current ingest system. Additionally, I’d expect over time that institutional repository managers will work out some system or systems with the NIH to either allow PubMed Central to sweep local repositories to automatically harvest approved, NIHfunded manuscripts, or for the local repository to automatically upload such manuscripts directly to PubMed Central. Once the paper is on deposit in PubMed Central in addition to the local repository, the advantages are wider potential readership through the linkages that are provided from PubMed Central to the myriad other NIH databases. That’s where the really exciting opportunities are for researchers to leverage this new resource and find new ways to make research connections.
Research, the European Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and others. We’ve now seen similarly worded policies adopted by all of these entities. It’s entirely probable that other United States agencies, and agencies abroad, will follow suit. I wouldn’t necessarily expect perfect clones of the NIH policy; there should and will be differences that reflect the unique nature of different disciplines. But I do think that basic premise of open access to the results of research will be a path that the majority of agencies that invest in research will pursue, as they increasingly recognize that broad access provides a greater return on their investment. Librarians are on the forefront of helping to prepare both faculty members and administrators to understand and comply with the NIH public access policy. They can help smooth the way for compliance on two main fronts: helping faculty understand the technical aspects of depositing manuscripts (how to do it and who can help), and they can help faculty understand what is needed in terms of effective rights management. For example, has the faculty member reserved the rights needed before signing copyright transfer. There is a great deal of activity happening on campuses, especially since the NIH policy was signed into law in late December 2007.5 There are also some good, general resources that already have been developed to help librarians communicate with faculty members, university counsels, offices of sponsored research, etc. I’d point to the NIH public access policy Web site, the SPARC Web site, and the ARL Web site as just a few examples of these resources, with more coming on-line regularly.
MP: Harvard is considering making the scholarship of its faculty freely available through its institutional repository. Is this compatible with the NIH mandate? Are you concerned about a proliferation of institutional silos? HJ: The recent vote by the Harvard University faculty to implement a policy that makes open access the default setting for their research is as groundbreaking as the NIH policy and notable because it is an author-driven initiative rather than a top-down mandate.4 I see it as absolutely compatible with the NIH policy: they share the ultimate goal of expanding access to and use of scholarly output, and both policies explicitly recognize the importance of preserving this material in digital repositories. There is no mention of exclusivity in either policy, and nothing that says any article that appears in PubMed Central or in the Harvard repository must stay “siloed” within those confines. So I welcome both as two very different but very effective and compatible approaches.
MP: Any final thoughts that you’d like to share with the Serials Review readership? HJ: Just to say thank you for the chance to talk with you all!
Notes 1. National Institutes of Health, “Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIHFunded Research,” http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/ NOT-OD-08-033.html (accessed March 3, 2008).
MP: Do you think the NIH mandate will become a model for other government funding agencies? If yes, have you begun working on that effort?
2. Ibid.
HJ: We are already in a kind of “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” type of situation when it comes to the proliferation of public access policies! For instance, much of the language in the recently adopted NIH policy was first circulated in 2004. Around the same time, similar language was being considered by other funders (both public and private), such as the Research Councils United Kingdom, the Canadian Institutes of Health
3. Ibid. 4. Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Office of Communications, “Harvard to Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles for Faculty,” http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/ releases/scholarly_02122008.html (accessed March 3, 2008). 5. U.S. Congress. House. Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008. HR 2764. 110th Cong., 1st sess. Congressional Record 153, no. 193 (Dec. 17, 2007): H15645.
157
Heather Joseph talks about her career with SPARC and BioOne. She discusses the NIH mandate that NIH-funded research will be deposited into PubMed Central, and she shares her views on some of the controversial issues the mandate has raised about copyright, peer review, and embargo periods. She also addresses the recent decision by the Harvard faculty to make their scholarly output accessible through the university’s institutional repository, and she suggests ways that librarians can help their faculties prepare for open access. Serials Review 2008; 34:154–157.
spread adoption of open access to scholarly research; identifies and negotiates partnerships with scholarly publishers; builds coalitions of support; and generally represents the interests and values of SPARC to the stakeholders in scholarly communication. Before coming to SPARC, Heather served as the president and chief operating officer of BioOne, a SPARC publisher partner. Under her leadership, BioOne helped small scholarly societies in the biological sciences maintain their independence while bringing their publications online. For her work in successfully launching and establishing BioOne, Heather was awarded the 2002 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ award for services to not-for-profit publishing. She also served as elected president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing for the 2004–2005 term. In this interview, Heather Joseph discusses her career and what led her to SPARC and BioOne. She also discusses the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate that NIH-funded research will be deposited into PubMed Central, and she shares her views on some of the controversial issues it has raised about copyright, peer review, and embargo periods. She addresses the recent decision by the Harvard faculty to make their publications openly accessible through Harvard’s institutional repository and why this decision and the NIH mandate are compatible. Finally, Heather Joseph has suggestions for ways that librarians can help their faculties prepare for the implementation of the NIH public access mandate.
Introduction Heather Joseph is a respected authority on scholarly communication issues, and more recently, she has become well known for her efforts within the open access movement. Her work is informed by her extensive experience in the scholarly publishing industry. Currently, Heather is the executive director of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. She leads SPARC’s advocacy efforts to support widePage is Head of Acquisitions, Rutgers University Libraries, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA; email: [email protected]. Parks is Technology and Catalog Librarian, W.W. Clark Memorial Library, University of Portland, Portland, OR 97203, USA; email: [email protected].
Mary Page (MP): Everyone knows you through SPARC and ARL. Could you tell us about your career before ARL, and how you began working with serials?
doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2008.03.003
154
Parks / Serials Review 34 (2008) 154–157
Heather Joseph (HJ): I watched the movie All the Presidents Men one too many times as a teenager and started out studying journalism at American University here in Washington, DC. I originally thought I wanted to be a reporter, but my degree work, along with an internship at a start-up weekly newspaper here in the city, taught me two things: first, I hated to ask people questions that they didn’t particularly want to answer; and second, I found the business of publishing much more interesting than I’d ever imagined. I wanted to get an MBA to learn more about how to do this, so I searched for a job that would help out with tuition and let me keep a hand in the publishing arena. I was fortunate enough to find the perfect position with the American Astronomical Society (AAS). It was my introduction to the world of scholarly publication and scientific journals, and I could not have possibly landed in a better place at a better time. When I started there in 1990, the Web and e-mail were not yet ubiquitous, but because many of the AAS members worked in physics and related disciplines, they were early users of ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. The AAS had an e-mail account, so my introduction to the world of scholarly journals was inextricably linked to my introduction with networked communications. Talk about imprinting! From day one, I remember the members asking questions like, “When are you going to learn to take our meeting abstracts electronically?” and “you all should figure out a way for us to send in our journal articles over e-mail.” It was a constant chorus of questions that have evolved throughout the past eighteen years of working primarily in the scholarly society publishing arena.
advocacy—and we work hard to keep vibrant efforts moving in each of these areas simultaneously. For example, we’ve created an extremely robust educational campaign around open access: introducing open access as a concept, outlining potential mechanisms to implement it, and providing resources for spreading the word. But along with the educational efforts, we also make sure that we put resources into incubating various open access business models, as well advocating vigorously for public policies that create an environment in which open access can thrive. Certainly the advocacy work that SPARC has been deeply engaged in, particularly in calling for public access to the results of federally funded research, have been quite effective. As for SPARC endeavors that weren’t quite the successes we’d hoped, I’d say the lessons center mainly around issues of scale. For example, one of our earliest programs was an effort to introduce lower-priced journals into the marketplace to compete directly with extremely high-priced titles—an effort to infuse an element of competition into the journal market. While SPARC was successful in helping to shepherd a number of such titles to market, I couldn’t honestly say that the overall impact was what we’d originally hoped for. But again, I think that’s largely an issue of scale—the overhead and resources needed to introduce new titles in the numbers that would be needed to truly begin to bring prices down systemwide are quite significant.
MP: SPARC was launched in 1998. Can you talk about some of its accomplishments? Can you talk about any SPARC undertakings that weren’t successful?
HJ: On the one hand, I completely understand that SPARC’s alternative titles can be looked at as just an added expense. But I think we have to take the big picture approach and understand that the introduction of these titles served a crucial purpose. They gave notice that the library community was serious about its message that business as usual would no longer be an option and that the community was more than capable of enlisting the support and partnership of researchers, authors, and editors who agreed that publishing models needed to change. SPARC alternative journals were, and are, a very real investment in our ability to marshal real resources and develop viable alternatives within the scholarly publishing system. They are an important demonstration of libraries “walking the walk” as well as “talking the talk” about change. And, not inconsequentially, the SPARC alternative journals have made progress establishing high-quality status in terms of impact factors, as well as helping to moderate price increases with the journals with which they directly compete.
MP: How do you respond to critics who say that they have to subscribe to both the SPARC title and the commercial title it’s competing with?
HJ: My introduction to SPARC came in 2000, when I was hired to launch BioOne. As you know, this SPARC initiative raised money from the library community, invested it in non-profit publishers specifically to convert their journals from print to electronic format, and created an online platform to deliver their content as widely as possible. We started out working with just thirty-seven titles: BioOne has thrived and now provides its service to more than 140 journals. Online journal publishing has certainly been one of SPARC’s major success stories. On a broader scale, I think that one central contribution of SPARC has been raising the profile of scholarly communications issues. The issue has expanded from a library-centric issue of “journals cost too much” into a conversation about leveraging new opportunities to expand the scope of dissemination of the results of science, research, and scholarship. It involves not just the library community, but also researchers and the academy, as well as national and international policymakers. The issue of access to and use of scholarly output has become one of great public interest. One key to SPARC’s ability to produce successful outcomes is its operating structure—we have three distinct program areas—education, incubation, and
MP: SPARC has become a mature organization with a well-defined mission and record of success. How do you see its future development? HJ: With the community’s strong support, SPARC has grown considerably over the past ten years, which is
155
Parks / Serials Review 34 (2008) 154–157
immensely encouraging. Besides deepening our presence and programs in the US and in Canada, where SPARC was first established, we’ve grown considerably in our international presence. SPARC Europe has become a well-established, well-respected presence in Europe, and plays a crucial role in advocacy and education efforts, especially on open access and related topics. SPARC Japan, our most recent endeavor, is beginning to make its mark on issues relating to scholarly publishing. We fully expect that our opportunities to work collaboratively will expand as each organization increases it capacity in its own regions, and we look forward to widening the circle of partners. We think there’s tremendous opportunity to do this not only geographically, but also in terms of partnering with new constituencies.
two ways. First is the concern that somehow the NIH policy will force large scale changes in the economics of how journals are currently supported. Presumably, the concern is that the NIH policy will lead to immediate, widespread cancellations of journal subscriptions by libraries, which represent the lion’s share of revenue for most journal publishers. This will lead to a dramatic reduction in the revenue that publishers currently have to allocate to the administration of the peer review system. Of course, most libraries will not cancel a journal simply because some subset of its articles appears a year later in PubMed Central. Libraries base cancellation decisions largely on a combination of the criteria of price, demand by faculty, and availability of funds. They are far more likely to cancel a journal because of a price increase implemented by a publisher or a budget cut imposed by an institution than on the availability of some of the content in another source. The second iteration of the peer review argument that I have seen notes that if NIH-funded articles are now routinely collected into a database that is administered by a government agency, the government will somehow then consider itself as playing an active role in the overall publishing process and will change the current peer review process in a way that will undermine its integrity. This is, of course, not the intention of the NIH policy, which neither stipulates nor encourages such a change in the government’s role. The NIH policy will not have any direct effect on the current system of peer review. Peer review will continue to be carried out voluntarily by researchers, because it is a key responsibility of contributing members of the scientific research community.
MP: Let’s talk about the recent National Institutes of Health mandate that all NIH-funded research will be deposited into PubMed Central.1 Is this a defining moment for the open access movement? HJ: I think it is. The debate and discussion on this particular policy played out very publicly over the past several years. Interest wasn’t just limited to the academy and trade publications; the level of coverage by the popular press highlighted how closely the world was following this issue. The fact that Congress signed this policy into law imbues a significance that cannot be overstated. This isn’t simply an interesting proposal by one special interest group: this is a fully vetted, thoroughly discussed policy that is now the law of the land. Certainly that represents a watershed moment for open access, and it has implications far beyond a single government agency in the United States.
MP: Are you satisfied with the twelve-month embargo? Is there interest in shortening the embargo period or eliminating it completely?
MP: Publisher groups have stated that the NIH mandate infringes on their copyrights. Is that true?
HJ: The concerns of those who think that twelve months is too long an embargo period completely resonate with me, but from a pragmatic standpoint this was a necessary compromise. The NIH policy represents a sea change in the parameters of the scholarly communications marketplace. With this policy we’ve leapfrogged from information being locked up behind exclusive distribution licenses perpetually to an embargo period limited to no longer than one single year. That’s an enormous step forward. Also, the policy allows the researcher to determine the embargo period. Remember, this is not a static twelvemonth requirement; it calls for NIH-funded articles to be made publicly available “no longer than twelve months after the official date of publication.”3 This gives the power to the research community to determine what is best in terms of the timing of an article’s accessibility.
HJ: No. There is nothing in the policy that inherently conflicts with, undermines, or threatens copyright. The policy is concerned with contract terms, not copyright exceptions. The proposed provision simply provides that in exchange for public funding, investigators must deposit copies of articles resulting from that funding into PubMed Central so that they are available to the public. It’s simply incorrect to say that the NIH policy, as required by Congress, requires a violation of copyright. In fact, it requires compliance with copyright. Congress includes a proviso to the language in the bill’s text that specifically reads: “Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.”2 MP: Another concern is peer review. How will the NIH mandate affect peer review?
MP: How would you respond to a researcher who deposits his work in his institutional repository where it will be freely available? Why does he have to deposit it into PubMed Central as well?
HJ: The notion that the NIH public access policy will somehow negatively affect the system of peer review has got to be the single most oft-repeated misconception about the NIH policy (and in fact, public access policies in general) that I’ve run across. I’ve seen it presented in
HJ: First of all, I applaud researchers who take the critical step of ensuring broad access to their work by placing it in
156
Parks / Serials Review 34 (2008) 154–157
an institutional repository. They clearly understand the value of sharing their material so that it can be built upon by their colleagues. For those researchers, the transfer of a copy of that material into PubMed Central should be a fairly trivial process. They’ve already got the manuscript prepared, and the NIH has found that it takes a researcher less than ten minutes on average to deposit a manuscript using their current ingest system. Additionally, I’d expect over time that institutional repository managers will work out some system or systems with the NIH to either allow PubMed Central to sweep local repositories to automatically harvest approved, NIHfunded manuscripts, or for the local repository to automatically upload such manuscripts directly to PubMed Central. Once the paper is on deposit in PubMed Central in addition to the local repository, the advantages are wider potential readership through the linkages that are provided from PubMed Central to the myriad other NIH databases. That’s where the really exciting opportunities are for researchers to leverage this new resource and find new ways to make research connections.
Research, the European Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and others. We’ve now seen similarly worded policies adopted by all of these entities. It’s entirely probable that other United States agencies, and agencies abroad, will follow suit. I wouldn’t necessarily expect perfect clones of the NIH policy; there should and will be differences that reflect the unique nature of different disciplines. But I do think that basic premise of open access to the results of research will be a path that the majority of agencies that invest in research will pursue, as they increasingly recognize that broad access provides a greater return on their investment. Librarians are on the forefront of helping to prepare both faculty members and administrators to understand and comply with the NIH public access policy. They can help smooth the way for compliance on two main fronts: helping faculty understand the technical aspects of depositing manuscripts (how to do it and who can help), and they can help faculty understand what is needed in terms of effective rights management. For example, has the faculty member reserved the rights needed before signing copyright transfer. There is a great deal of activity happening on campuses, especially since the NIH policy was signed into law in late December 2007.5 There are also some good, general resources that already have been developed to help librarians communicate with faculty members, university counsels, offices of sponsored research, etc. I’d point to the NIH public access policy Web site, the SPARC Web site, and the ARL Web site as just a few examples of these resources, with more coming on-line regularly.
MP: Harvard is considering making the scholarship of its faculty freely available through its institutional repository. Is this compatible with the NIH mandate? Are you concerned about a proliferation of institutional silos? HJ: The recent vote by the Harvard University faculty to implement a policy that makes open access the default setting for their research is as groundbreaking as the NIH policy and notable because it is an author-driven initiative rather than a top-down mandate.4 I see it as absolutely compatible with the NIH policy: they share the ultimate goal of expanding access to and use of scholarly output, and both policies explicitly recognize the importance of preserving this material in digital repositories. There is no mention of exclusivity in either policy, and nothing that says any article that appears in PubMed Central or in the Harvard repository must stay “siloed” within those confines. So I welcome both as two very different but very effective and compatible approaches.
MP: Any final thoughts that you’d like to share with the Serials Review readership? HJ: Just to say thank you for the chance to talk with you all!
Notes 1. National Institutes of Health, “Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIHFunded Research,” http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/ NOT-OD-08-033.html (accessed March 3, 2008).
MP: Do you think the NIH mandate will become a model for other government funding agencies? If yes, have you begun working on that effort?
2. Ibid.
HJ: We are already in a kind of “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” type of situation when it comes to the proliferation of public access policies! For instance, much of the language in the recently adopted NIH policy was first circulated in 2004. Around the same time, similar language was being considered by other funders (both public and private), such as the Research Councils United Kingdom, the Canadian Institutes of Health
3. Ibid. 4. Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Office of Communications, “Harvard to Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles for Faculty,” http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/ releases/scholarly_02122008.html (accessed March 3, 2008). 5. U.S. Congress. House. Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008. HR 2764. 110th Cong., 1st sess. Congressional Record 153, no. 193 (Dec. 17, 2007): H15645.
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