- Email: [email protected]
The Potential Impact of ‘Public Access’ Legislation on Access to Forestry Literature
The Potential Impact of ‘Public Access’ Legislation on Access to Forestry Literature Bradley Brazzeal and Patrick L. Carr Available online 30 October 2008
There have been increasing calls for the United States (U.S.) government’s implementation of broad public access policies mandating free online access to federally funded research. This study examines the potential impact of such a policy on peerreviewed forestry literature. The authors analyze information about federal government authorship, federal government funding, and U.S. authorship indicated in articles published in five core forestry journals in 2006. The results of the analysis provide evidence that federal public access legislation would have a significant impact on the accessibility of forestry literature published in leading journals in the field. Serials Review 2008; 34:252–256. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
the article aims to provide insights into how a broad public access mandate could impact the accessibility of forestry research.
Introduction There is growing support for legislation mandating that research funded by the United States federal government be made freely accessible online. At present, the most significant outcome of this effort has been a provision included in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008. This provision stipulates that all recipients of direct funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deposit final peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from the funded research for inclusion in the NIH online archive, PubMed Central. While the full impact of this legislation is not yet measurable, there is no doubt that it holds farreaching implications on scholarly communication within the health sciences. Anticipating the possibility that legislation mandating the public access of other federally funded research may be passed in the future, this article investigates the potential impact that public access mandates would have on the forestry literature. The authors analyze the 2006 articles published in five core forestry journals. Specifically, they assess information about federal government authorship, federal government funding, and U.S. authorship of the articles published within these journals. Through this analysis,
Literature Review The open access (OA) movement, which aims to make research freely available online, has been described as taking two general forms: gold OA and green OA. According to Charles Oppenheim, gold OA refers to the publishing model in which all articles in a journal are freely available electronically. This model is often, but not always, financed by charging authors a publication fee. Some major publishers of non-OA journals have adapted this model by giving authors the option to pay a publication fee for their particular article, which would then be freely available. Green OA is accomplished through self-archiving, such as posting a manuscript in institutional or discipline-based repositories.1 An outgrowth of the OA movement is the public access or taxpayer access movement, which maintains that access to peer-reviewed research articles funded by the federal government is both a right of taxpayers and “an essential, inseparable component of our nation’s investment in science.”2 A number of federal government agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, have already taken the green route to OA and created repositories to collect the scholarly output of their employees, including peer-reviewed journal articles. 3 However, public access supporters advocate federal mandates requiring the creation of repositories for all articles resulting from
Brazzeal is an Instructional Services Librarian, Mississippi State University Libraries, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Carr is the Electronic & Continuing Resources Acquisitions Coordinator, Joyner Library, East Carolina University, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. 0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2008.09.009
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federal funding, regardless of whether they are written by federal employees or made possible through government funding agreements. These calls resulted in the introduction of Congressional bills, such as the Public Access to Science Act of 20034 and the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006,5 but neither of these was voted on. Meanwhile, in 2005, the NIH initiated a policy requesting that authors receiving NIH funding submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts to NIH for inclusion in the PubMed Central database.6 This voluntary policy changed to a federal mandate with the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008,7 making the NIH one of a growing number of funding organizations throughout the world with a mandatory OA policy.8 The NIH Public Access Policy states that, beginning April 7, 2008, authors of peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from any amount of NIH funding must submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central within one year of publication.9 Thus, the policy applies to individual articles rather than entire journal issues. Likewise, the policy allows that articles might be available from the publisher a year before the freely accessible manuscripts become available in PubMed Central. Despite misgivings about the policy (discussed below), many publishers, including Elsevier and Wiley– Blackwell, have agreed to submit final manuscripts on behalf of their authors.10 The library community has been generally enthusiastic about the new policy. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has called the new policy “an important step forward for science, scientists, and the higher education community,” noting that “[t]his will greatly expand access to the estimated 80,000 articles that result each year from NIH funding for use in research, teaching, and patient care.”11 This view was shared in a statement by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC).12 However, librarian Rick Anderson has cautioned that there are “hidden costs” associated with this and other types of OA that warrant careful consideration.13 Many scholarly publishing organizations have been critical of the NIH policy. Shortly after the passage of the law, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued a press release stating that the policy threatened intellectual freedom, intellectual property rights, and publishers’ ability to stay in business.14 These sentiments were expanded in an April 2008 report by the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (IASTMP). Citing a study by Chris Beckett and Simon Inger, the report states that “there is strong evidence that the free availability of any post-peer review version in systematic repositories or interlinked institutional repositories will undermine the ability to sell subscriptions.”15 (Beckett and Inger also found that librarians are less likely to cancel journal subscriptions as the embargo period for the corresponding OA content is lengthened.16) The IASTMP report warned that the new arrangement is untested and noted that a more practical solution would be for funders to include in each grant funds for the article to be published with
the author-pays option that many publishers now provide.17 Also writing from the perspective of publishers, Sally Morris concurs that the OA movement has the potential to have a highly negative impact on library subscriptions. However, rather than opposing the OA movement, Morris argues that publishers need to both demonstrate the value they contribute in scholarly communication and evolve in order to stake out a viable role in the emerging information landscape.18 Stephen Pinfield takes a similar perspective. He argues that “open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals are not necessarily in competition” and points to “a significant body of empirical evidence which shows that the two can (and do) coexist and may even be complimentary.” In order for this to occur, however, Pinfield states that publishers and repository administrators must both adapt to changing conditions.19 According to NIH estimates, about 80,000 articles a year result from NIH funding,20 while the National Science Foundation (NSF) estimated that 40,000 “publication citations” resulted from funded projects “due in calendar year 2003.”21 Although agencies can provide such information for their own funding, there is a lack of research examining the potential effect of broader public access legislation inclusive of all agencies of the federal government that support scientific research in specific disciplines. The authors wanted to help fill this gap in the literature by investigating the authorship and funding patterns in five core forestry journals.
Methodology To obtain a list of journals frequently used by forestry researchers, the authors consulted the 2006 Journal Citation Reports of the Institute for Scientific Information. The authors selected the top five journals cited by journals in the Forestry category. These journals are: Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Ecology, Forest Ecology & Management, Forest Science, and Tree Physiology. For each article or review in the 2006 issues of these journals, the authors used author affiliation and acknowledgment sections to gather information about U.S. authorship, federal government authorship, and federal government funding. The authors created a Microsoft Access® database to record and analyze the information gathered. In this study, U.S. authorship refers not to the nationality of the authors but rather the location of the institution with which the authors were affiliated. A conservative approach to federal authorship and funding was taken. For example, the Smithsonian Institute is listed in the U.S. Government Manual as a quasi-official agency, but authorship or funding from that agency was not counted as coming from the federal government. Similarly, if the acknowledgment section did not clearly indicate federal funding, then the article was not counted as having received this funding. Additionally, some articles authored or co-authored by a researcher affiliated with a certain federal agency also
253
Bradley Brazzeal and Patrick L. Carr
Serials Review
edge federal funding. Thus, if a broad public access policy had been in effect at the time, manuscripts for 68% of all articles that were authored or co-authored by researchers employed by institutions in the United States would be available online.
Table 1. Overall trend in federal authorship and funding Number of articles Federal authorship (total) Full Partial Federal funding (no federal authorship) No federal funding or authorship Total articles
Percentage of articles
190 39 151 268
13% 3% 10% 19%
983
68%
1,441
100%
Federal Authorship and Funding by Journal Figure 1 shows federal authorship and funding by journal. Among the five journals, Ecology had the highest percentage (53%) of articles with acknowledged federal funding or authorship, with 44% of all articles acknowledging funding and 9% with federal authorship. Tree Physiology had the lowest combined percentage (19%).
acknowledged funding by that same agency. In such cases, it was sometimes unclear if the funding was intramural or extramural, and, in the current investigation, funding by the agency was not counted.
Author and Funding Agencies Of the 190 articles with federal authorship, the vast majority were authored or co-authored by employees of the Forest Service and other agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (n = 152). The only other author agency represented in more than ten articles was the United States Geological Survey (USGS) (n = 25). It was beyond the scope of this study to determine how many of these articles have already been made available online to the public via the agencies’ Web sites; however, searches on Google Scholar for a small sample of these articles did suggest that a significant percentage of published articles authored fully or partially by federal government employees are being posted online in PDF format. Keeping in mind the conservative approach to counting funding indicated in the Methodology section, the NSF funded 193 of the articles. This was followed by the USDA (n = 82), the Environmental Protection Agency (n = 17), the National Aeronautical & Space Agency (n = 15), and the Department of Energy (n = 14). (Note that some articles acknowledge funding from multiple sources.) Eight of the articles received NIH funding and would be placed in PubMed Central if they had been conducted under the NIH Public Access guidelines. Table 3 shows the number of articles that resulted from authors and/or funding from various agencies. Agencies of the USDA had the highest number (n = 234),
Results and Discussion Federal Authorship and Funding for All Articles There were 1441 articles in the selected journals in 2006. As shown in Table 1, 39 (3%) of the articles were authored entirely by employees of the U.S. federal government, and another 151 (10%) resulted from collaboration between federal and non-federal employees. Thus, nearly one in eight articles (13%) resulted from efforts of federal employees. Of the remaining 1251 (87%) articles, 268 (19%) acknowledged federal funding. When combining the 190 articles with full or partial federal authorship and the 268 non-federal authorship articles that acknowledge federal funding, the study shows that 458 (32%) of the articles contain federal authorship and/or acknowledge federal funding. Federal Authors and Funding for Articles with Authors at a U.S. Institution Of the 1441 articles examined, 656 were either authored or co-authored by researchers employed by U.S. institutions (including the federal government). Looking at these 656 articles, the authors found that 29% had one or more federal authors, and 39% had no federal author but acknowledged federal funding. As Table 2 shows, 449 either contain federal authorship and/or acknowlTable 2. Authorship and funding for articles with one or more authors at a U.S. institution
Federal authorship Federal funding (no federal author) No federal authorship or funding Total
Number of articles
Percentage
190 259
29% 39%
207
32%
656
100%
Figure 1. Federal authorship and funding by journal.
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which articles authored by federal government employees are already archived and freely accessible through publicly accessible repositories. Research investigating this topic would shed further light on the true impact of public access legislation.
Table 3. Combined number of articles resulting from authorship or funding of federal departments and agencies a Number of articles acknowledging federal authors or funding United States Department of Agriculture (all agencies) National Science Foundation United States Geological Survey b Department of Energy Environmental Protection Agency National Aeronautics & Space Administration National Park Service b National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Fish & Wildlife Service b National Institutes of Health Other agencies a b
234
Notes
195 28 20 18 16
1. Charles Oppenheim, “Electronic Scholarly Publishing and Open Access,” Journal of Information Science 34 no. 4 (2008): 579–580. 2. Alliance for Taxpayer Access, “Alliance for Taxpayer Access,” under “Statement of Principles,” http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/ (accessed July 3, 2008).
12 9
3. Links to the U.S. Forest Service repository (Treesearch) and other federal repositories are available at “Science.gov Selected Science Information,” http://www.science.gov/searchdbs.html (accessed July 3, 2008).
8 8 21
4. Public Access to Science Act, HR 2613, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (June 26, 2003), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108: H.R.2613 (accessed July 11, 2008).
Some articles had authors or funding from multiple sources. These agencies are all part of the Department of the Interior.
5. Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, S 2695, 109th Cong., 2d sess. (May 2, 2006), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z? c109:S.2695 (accessed July 11, 2008).
accounting for 16% of all articles examined. This was followed fairly closely by the NSF (n = 195). The next highest agency was the USGS (n = 28). Note, however, that the USGS, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management (not in Table 2) are all agencies of the Department of the Interior, and those four combined were responsible for fifty-one of the articles.
6. NIH, “Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research,” http://grants.nih.gov/ grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html (accessed July 3, 2008). 7. NIH, “Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research,” http:// grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html (accessed July 3, 2008). 8. SHERPA, “Research funder’s open access policies,” http://www. sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/ (accessed April 16, 2008). 9. NIH, “Public Access Homepage,” under “The Law,” http:// publicaccess.nih.gov/ (accessed August 5, 2008).
Conclusion This study provides evidence that federal public access legislation would have a significant impact on the accessibility of forestry literature published in leading journals in the field. Indeed, nearly one third of the articles in the selected journals acknowledge federal authorship or funding. Public access legislation could ensure that this research is made available to all who could benefit from it. For example, private foresters may not have the resources to subscribe to top forestry journals, but this legislation would at least provide some form of access to about a third of the articles in those journals. Researchers at smaller universities and colleges could also benefit from broad public access legislation. Even if researchers at these institutions preferred to see the published article, the ability to view the entire manuscript online could help them determine whether or not to attempt to acquire the article through interlibrary loan or some other means. This study suggests several areas of further research. A similar methodology could be used to determine the percentage of articles that would be made available if other governments passed broad public access legislation. Likewise, a similar methodology could be applied to journals in other disciplines in order to determine the impact of public access legislation on these disciplines. The current study also brings into question the extent to
10. Elsevier, “Elsevier NIH Policy Statement,” http://www.elsevier. com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/nihauthorrequest (accessed June 30, 2008); Wiley–Blackwell, “NIH Mandate,” http://www. wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-321171.html (accessed June 30, 2008). 11. ARL, “NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities,” under “A Step Forward,” http://www.arl.org/sc/implement/ nih/guide/ (accessed July 2, 2008). 12. NASULGC, “NASULGC Offers Support for NIH Public Access Policy,” http://www.nasulgc.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid= 896&srcid=829 (accessed July 2, 2008). 13. Rick Anderson, “Open Access—Clear Benefits, Hidden Costs,” Learned Publishing 20, no. 2 (2007): 83–84. 14. AAP, “Publishers Say Enactment of NIH Mandate on Journal Articles Undermines Intellectual Property Rights Essential to Science Publishing,” http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/ NIHMandatoryPolicy.htm (accessed July 2, 2008). 15. IASTMP, An Overview of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing and the Value It Adds to Research Outputs (Oxford: International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, 2008), 11, http://www.stm-assoc.org/documents-statements-public-co/ 2008.4%20Overview%20of%20STM%20Publishing%20% 20Value%20to%20Research.pdf (accessed July 2, 2008). 16. Chris Beckett and Simon Inger Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-Existence or Competition? An International Survey of Librarians’ Preferences (London: Publishing Research Consortium, 2006) 20, www.publishingresearch.org.uk/documents/ Self-archiving_report.pdf (accessed Feb. 9, 2008).
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20. NIH, “Public Access Frequently Asked Questions,” http:// publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#policy (accessed July 3, 2008).
17. IASTMP, An Overview of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing, 10–12. 18. Sally Morris, “Will the Parasite Kill the Host? Are Institutional Repositories a Fact of Life—and Does It Matter?” Serials 20 no. 3 (2007): 172–179.
21. NSF Office of Inspector General, “Audit of NSF’s Policies on Public Access to the Results of NSF-Funded Research,” (Washington: National Science Foundation, 2006) 11, http:// www.nsf.gov/oig/06-2-004_final.pdf (accessed July 3, 2008).
19. Stephen Pinfield, “Can Open Access Repositories and PeerReviewed Journals Coexist?” Serials 20 no. 3 (2007): 170.
256
There have been increasing calls for the United States (U.S.) government’s implementation of broad public access policies mandating free online access to federally funded research. This study examines the potential impact of such a policy on peerreviewed forestry literature. The authors analyze information about federal government authorship, federal government funding, and U.S. authorship indicated in articles published in five core forestry journals in 2006. The results of the analysis provide evidence that federal public access legislation would have a significant impact on the accessibility of forestry literature published in leading journals in the field. Serials Review 2008; 34:252–256. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
the article aims to provide insights into how a broad public access mandate could impact the accessibility of forestry research.
Introduction There is growing support for legislation mandating that research funded by the United States federal government be made freely accessible online. At present, the most significant outcome of this effort has been a provision included in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008. This provision stipulates that all recipients of direct funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deposit final peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from the funded research for inclusion in the NIH online archive, PubMed Central. While the full impact of this legislation is not yet measurable, there is no doubt that it holds farreaching implications on scholarly communication within the health sciences. Anticipating the possibility that legislation mandating the public access of other federally funded research may be passed in the future, this article investigates the potential impact that public access mandates would have on the forestry literature. The authors analyze the 2006 articles published in five core forestry journals. Specifically, they assess information about federal government authorship, federal government funding, and U.S. authorship of the articles published within these journals. Through this analysis,
Literature Review The open access (OA) movement, which aims to make research freely available online, has been described as taking two general forms: gold OA and green OA. According to Charles Oppenheim, gold OA refers to the publishing model in which all articles in a journal are freely available electronically. This model is often, but not always, financed by charging authors a publication fee. Some major publishers of non-OA journals have adapted this model by giving authors the option to pay a publication fee for their particular article, which would then be freely available. Green OA is accomplished through self-archiving, such as posting a manuscript in institutional or discipline-based repositories.1 An outgrowth of the OA movement is the public access or taxpayer access movement, which maintains that access to peer-reviewed research articles funded by the federal government is both a right of taxpayers and “an essential, inseparable component of our nation’s investment in science.”2 A number of federal government agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, have already taken the green route to OA and created repositories to collect the scholarly output of their employees, including peer-reviewed journal articles. 3 However, public access supporters advocate federal mandates requiring the creation of repositories for all articles resulting from
Brazzeal is an Instructional Services Librarian, Mississippi State University Libraries, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Carr is the Electronic & Continuing Resources Acquisitions Coordinator, Joyner Library, East Carolina University, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. 0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2008.09.009
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federal funding, regardless of whether they are written by federal employees or made possible through government funding agreements. These calls resulted in the introduction of Congressional bills, such as the Public Access to Science Act of 20034 and the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006,5 but neither of these was voted on. Meanwhile, in 2005, the NIH initiated a policy requesting that authors receiving NIH funding submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts to NIH for inclusion in the PubMed Central database.6 This voluntary policy changed to a federal mandate with the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008,7 making the NIH one of a growing number of funding organizations throughout the world with a mandatory OA policy.8 The NIH Public Access Policy states that, beginning April 7, 2008, authors of peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from any amount of NIH funding must submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central within one year of publication.9 Thus, the policy applies to individual articles rather than entire journal issues. Likewise, the policy allows that articles might be available from the publisher a year before the freely accessible manuscripts become available in PubMed Central. Despite misgivings about the policy (discussed below), many publishers, including Elsevier and Wiley– Blackwell, have agreed to submit final manuscripts on behalf of their authors.10 The library community has been generally enthusiastic about the new policy. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has called the new policy “an important step forward for science, scientists, and the higher education community,” noting that “[t]his will greatly expand access to the estimated 80,000 articles that result each year from NIH funding for use in research, teaching, and patient care.”11 This view was shared in a statement by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC).12 However, librarian Rick Anderson has cautioned that there are “hidden costs” associated with this and other types of OA that warrant careful consideration.13 Many scholarly publishing organizations have been critical of the NIH policy. Shortly after the passage of the law, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued a press release stating that the policy threatened intellectual freedom, intellectual property rights, and publishers’ ability to stay in business.14 These sentiments were expanded in an April 2008 report by the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (IASTMP). Citing a study by Chris Beckett and Simon Inger, the report states that “there is strong evidence that the free availability of any post-peer review version in systematic repositories or interlinked institutional repositories will undermine the ability to sell subscriptions.”15 (Beckett and Inger also found that librarians are less likely to cancel journal subscriptions as the embargo period for the corresponding OA content is lengthened.16) The IASTMP report warned that the new arrangement is untested and noted that a more practical solution would be for funders to include in each grant funds for the article to be published with
the author-pays option that many publishers now provide.17 Also writing from the perspective of publishers, Sally Morris concurs that the OA movement has the potential to have a highly negative impact on library subscriptions. However, rather than opposing the OA movement, Morris argues that publishers need to both demonstrate the value they contribute in scholarly communication and evolve in order to stake out a viable role in the emerging information landscape.18 Stephen Pinfield takes a similar perspective. He argues that “open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals are not necessarily in competition” and points to “a significant body of empirical evidence which shows that the two can (and do) coexist and may even be complimentary.” In order for this to occur, however, Pinfield states that publishers and repository administrators must both adapt to changing conditions.19 According to NIH estimates, about 80,000 articles a year result from NIH funding,20 while the National Science Foundation (NSF) estimated that 40,000 “publication citations” resulted from funded projects “due in calendar year 2003.”21 Although agencies can provide such information for their own funding, there is a lack of research examining the potential effect of broader public access legislation inclusive of all agencies of the federal government that support scientific research in specific disciplines. The authors wanted to help fill this gap in the literature by investigating the authorship and funding patterns in five core forestry journals.
Methodology To obtain a list of journals frequently used by forestry researchers, the authors consulted the 2006 Journal Citation Reports of the Institute for Scientific Information. The authors selected the top five journals cited by journals in the Forestry category. These journals are: Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Ecology, Forest Ecology & Management, Forest Science, and Tree Physiology. For each article or review in the 2006 issues of these journals, the authors used author affiliation and acknowledgment sections to gather information about U.S. authorship, federal government authorship, and federal government funding. The authors created a Microsoft Access® database to record and analyze the information gathered. In this study, U.S. authorship refers not to the nationality of the authors but rather the location of the institution with which the authors were affiliated. A conservative approach to federal authorship and funding was taken. For example, the Smithsonian Institute is listed in the U.S. Government Manual as a quasi-official agency, but authorship or funding from that agency was not counted as coming from the federal government. Similarly, if the acknowledgment section did not clearly indicate federal funding, then the article was not counted as having received this funding. Additionally, some articles authored or co-authored by a researcher affiliated with a certain federal agency also
253
Bradley Brazzeal and Patrick L. Carr
Serials Review
edge federal funding. Thus, if a broad public access policy had been in effect at the time, manuscripts for 68% of all articles that were authored or co-authored by researchers employed by institutions in the United States would be available online.
Table 1. Overall trend in federal authorship and funding Number of articles Federal authorship (total) Full Partial Federal funding (no federal authorship) No federal funding or authorship Total articles
Percentage of articles
190 39 151 268
13% 3% 10% 19%
983
68%
1,441
100%
Federal Authorship and Funding by Journal Figure 1 shows federal authorship and funding by journal. Among the five journals, Ecology had the highest percentage (53%) of articles with acknowledged federal funding or authorship, with 44% of all articles acknowledging funding and 9% with federal authorship. Tree Physiology had the lowest combined percentage (19%).
acknowledged funding by that same agency. In such cases, it was sometimes unclear if the funding was intramural or extramural, and, in the current investigation, funding by the agency was not counted.
Author and Funding Agencies Of the 190 articles with federal authorship, the vast majority were authored or co-authored by employees of the Forest Service and other agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (n = 152). The only other author agency represented in more than ten articles was the United States Geological Survey (USGS) (n = 25). It was beyond the scope of this study to determine how many of these articles have already been made available online to the public via the agencies’ Web sites; however, searches on Google Scholar for a small sample of these articles did suggest that a significant percentage of published articles authored fully or partially by federal government employees are being posted online in PDF format. Keeping in mind the conservative approach to counting funding indicated in the Methodology section, the NSF funded 193 of the articles. This was followed by the USDA (n = 82), the Environmental Protection Agency (n = 17), the National Aeronautical & Space Agency (n = 15), and the Department of Energy (n = 14). (Note that some articles acknowledge funding from multiple sources.) Eight of the articles received NIH funding and would be placed in PubMed Central if they had been conducted under the NIH Public Access guidelines. Table 3 shows the number of articles that resulted from authors and/or funding from various agencies. Agencies of the USDA had the highest number (n = 234),
Results and Discussion Federal Authorship and Funding for All Articles There were 1441 articles in the selected journals in 2006. As shown in Table 1, 39 (3%) of the articles were authored entirely by employees of the U.S. federal government, and another 151 (10%) resulted from collaboration between federal and non-federal employees. Thus, nearly one in eight articles (13%) resulted from efforts of federal employees. Of the remaining 1251 (87%) articles, 268 (19%) acknowledged federal funding. When combining the 190 articles with full or partial federal authorship and the 268 non-federal authorship articles that acknowledge federal funding, the study shows that 458 (32%) of the articles contain federal authorship and/or acknowledge federal funding. Federal Authors and Funding for Articles with Authors at a U.S. Institution Of the 1441 articles examined, 656 were either authored or co-authored by researchers employed by U.S. institutions (including the federal government). Looking at these 656 articles, the authors found that 29% had one or more federal authors, and 39% had no federal author but acknowledged federal funding. As Table 2 shows, 449 either contain federal authorship and/or acknowlTable 2. Authorship and funding for articles with one or more authors at a U.S. institution
Federal authorship Federal funding (no federal author) No federal authorship or funding Total
Number of articles
Percentage
190 259
29% 39%
207
32%
656
100%
Figure 1. Federal authorship and funding by journal.
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which articles authored by federal government employees are already archived and freely accessible through publicly accessible repositories. Research investigating this topic would shed further light on the true impact of public access legislation.
Table 3. Combined number of articles resulting from authorship or funding of federal departments and agencies a Number of articles acknowledging federal authors or funding United States Department of Agriculture (all agencies) National Science Foundation United States Geological Survey b Department of Energy Environmental Protection Agency National Aeronautics & Space Administration National Park Service b National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Fish & Wildlife Service b National Institutes of Health Other agencies a b
234
Notes
195 28 20 18 16
1. Charles Oppenheim, “Electronic Scholarly Publishing and Open Access,” Journal of Information Science 34 no. 4 (2008): 579–580. 2. Alliance for Taxpayer Access, “Alliance for Taxpayer Access,” under “Statement of Principles,” http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/ (accessed July 3, 2008).
12 9
3. Links to the U.S. Forest Service repository (Treesearch) and other federal repositories are available at “Science.gov Selected Science Information,” http://www.science.gov/searchdbs.html (accessed July 3, 2008).
8 8 21
4. Public Access to Science Act, HR 2613, 108th Cong., 1st sess. (June 26, 2003), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108: H.R.2613 (accessed July 11, 2008).
Some articles had authors or funding from multiple sources. These agencies are all part of the Department of the Interior.
5. Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, S 2695, 109th Cong., 2d sess. (May 2, 2006), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z? c109:S.2695 (accessed July 11, 2008).
accounting for 16% of all articles examined. This was followed fairly closely by the NSF (n = 195). The next highest agency was the USGS (n = 28). Note, however, that the USGS, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management (not in Table 2) are all agencies of the Department of the Interior, and those four combined were responsible for fifty-one of the articles.
6. NIH, “Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research,” http://grants.nih.gov/ grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html (accessed July 3, 2008). 7. NIH, “Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research,” http:// grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html (accessed July 3, 2008). 8. SHERPA, “Research funder’s open access policies,” http://www. sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/ (accessed April 16, 2008). 9. NIH, “Public Access Homepage,” under “The Law,” http:// publicaccess.nih.gov/ (accessed August 5, 2008).
Conclusion This study provides evidence that federal public access legislation would have a significant impact on the accessibility of forestry literature published in leading journals in the field. Indeed, nearly one third of the articles in the selected journals acknowledge federal authorship or funding. Public access legislation could ensure that this research is made available to all who could benefit from it. For example, private foresters may not have the resources to subscribe to top forestry journals, but this legislation would at least provide some form of access to about a third of the articles in those journals. Researchers at smaller universities and colleges could also benefit from broad public access legislation. Even if researchers at these institutions preferred to see the published article, the ability to view the entire manuscript online could help them determine whether or not to attempt to acquire the article through interlibrary loan or some other means. This study suggests several areas of further research. A similar methodology could be used to determine the percentage of articles that would be made available if other governments passed broad public access legislation. Likewise, a similar methodology could be applied to journals in other disciplines in order to determine the impact of public access legislation on these disciplines. The current study also brings into question the extent to
10. Elsevier, “Elsevier NIH Policy Statement,” http://www.elsevier. com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/nihauthorrequest (accessed June 30, 2008); Wiley–Blackwell, “NIH Mandate,” http://www. wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-321171.html (accessed June 30, 2008). 11. ARL, “NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities,” under “A Step Forward,” http://www.arl.org/sc/implement/ nih/guide/ (accessed July 2, 2008). 12. NASULGC, “NASULGC Offers Support for NIH Public Access Policy,” http://www.nasulgc.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid= 896&srcid=829 (accessed July 2, 2008). 13. Rick Anderson, “Open Access—Clear Benefits, Hidden Costs,” Learned Publishing 20, no. 2 (2007): 83–84. 14. AAP, “Publishers Say Enactment of NIH Mandate on Journal Articles Undermines Intellectual Property Rights Essential to Science Publishing,” http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/ NIHMandatoryPolicy.htm (accessed July 2, 2008). 15. IASTMP, An Overview of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing and the Value It Adds to Research Outputs (Oxford: International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, 2008), 11, http://www.stm-assoc.org/documents-statements-public-co/ 2008.4%20Overview%20of%20STM%20Publishing%20% 20Value%20to%20Research.pdf (accessed July 2, 2008). 16. Chris Beckett and Simon Inger Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-Existence or Competition? An International Survey of Librarians’ Preferences (London: Publishing Research Consortium, 2006) 20, www.publishingresearch.org.uk/documents/ Self-archiving_report.pdf (accessed Feb. 9, 2008).
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20. NIH, “Public Access Frequently Asked Questions,” http:// publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#policy (accessed July 3, 2008).
17. IASTMP, An Overview of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing, 10–12. 18. Sally Morris, “Will the Parasite Kill the Host? Are Institutional Repositories a Fact of Life—and Does It Matter?” Serials 20 no. 3 (2007): 172–179.
21. NSF Office of Inspector General, “Audit of NSF’s Policies on Public Access to the Results of NSF-Funded Research,” (Washington: National Science Foundation, 2006) 11, http:// www.nsf.gov/oig/06-2-004_final.pdf (accessed July 3, 2008).
19. Stephen Pinfield, “Can Open Access Repositories and PeerReviewed Journals Coexist?” Serials 20 no. 3 (2007): 170.
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