Scholarly Publishers Push for Collaboration to Advance
Scientific Communications and Public Access
Administration urged not to impose access mandates
For Immediate Release
Contact: Judith Platt (202-220-4551)
Jasmine Zick (202-220-4550)
WASHINGTON, DC January 21, 2010 – Publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly and
scientific journals called on the Administration today to adopt a collaborative approach to
the development of a federal policy to expand public access to scientific information.
They encouraged the Administration to avoid adopting policies that would damage the
very institutions that researchers, the public and government itself rely on to peer review,
publish, disseminate and preserve scientific information.
The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American
Publishers (AAP) and DC Principles Coalition for Free Access to Science expressed their
concerns in a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
The letter was submitted in response to a December 9, 2009 OSTP request for comments
on “Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies Across the
Federal Government.”
Publishers are concerned that inflexible, government-mandated solutions will
undermine the substantial contribution the private sector makes to science through its
management of the complex process that fuels millions of peer-reviewed journal
articles every year, making research results accessible to a global community of
researchers and other users.
Among the proposals under evaluation is executive branch action that would direct
agencies to post articles online that have already undergone peer review and other
significant improvements by publishers. A mandatory policy would undermine
essential intellectual property protections and blunt the ability of publishers to recover
the considerable costs associated with creating journals, disseminating scientific
information, building and maintaining digital platforms, managing and preserving the
scientific record and coordinating the peer review process. It would artificially force a
shift of those costs from users who subscribe to journals to authors, who would
increasingly be called on to fund the cost of publishing their articles.
Scholarly societies, non-profit and commercial publishers are opposed to the approach
taken at the National Institutes of Health in 2008, which mandated access to the post-peer
reviewed articles with little regard for its potential for harm to the quality and
development of scientific communications.
“Government agencies already have the ability to put online the results of research
funded by government agencies, in the form of research reports, summaries and data,”
said Martin Frank, Executive Director, American Physiological Society and Coordinator
of the DC Principles Coalition of non-profit publishers. But the Administration seems to
be moving toward taking and then posting private sector property in the form of
manuscripts and articles that have already undergone peer review and benefited from
significant investment and value-added by publishers,” he continued.
“Government mandates, if based on the dubious NIH public access policy, have no useful
place in the evolving world of scholarly publishing,” said Allan Adler, Vice President,
Government & Legal Affairs, Association of American Publishers. “They would bring a
wholly unnecessary, wasteful and inappropriate government intervention into the vibrant
private sector of publishing. Two-way collaboration with the private sector will advance
the Administration’s public access goals without the harmful effects of government
mandates that appropriate publishers’ investments,” he added.
The full text of the letter is available at http://www.pspcentral.org/OSTP.cfm
About AAP/PSP:
Members of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of
American Publishers, Inc.(AAP) publish the vast majority of materials used in the U.S.
by scholars and professionals in science, medicine, technology, business, law, reference,
social science and the humanities and are worldwide disseminators, archivists, and
shapers of scientific research via print and electronic means. The Division's 100 plus
professional societies, commercial publishers and university presses produce books,
journals, computer software, databases and electronic products.
About The DC Principles
The DC Principles Coalition was founded in March 2004 to represent the concerns of
not-for-profit publishers, who believe in free access to science and who make the full text
of their journals freely available within the constraints of the publisher’s business and
publishing requirements. The DC Principles Coalition is comprised of 75 not-for-profit
publishers responsible for the publication of nearly 400 journals. The societies
themselves have over 700,000 individual members. Together Coalition members publish
nearly 100,000 articles annually.