AAP-FUD

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(AAP logo)
(Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science logo)

Allan Adler
VP, Government & Legal Affairs
Association of American Publishers
50 F Street, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20001
Tel: (202) 220-4544
Fax: (202) 3473690
Email: adler@publishers.org
www.pspcentral.org

Martin Frank, Ph.D.
Executive Director
American Physiological Society
9650 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20814-3991
Tel: (301) 634-7118
Fax: (301) 634-7241
Email: mfrank@the-aps.org


Dear Representative Towns and Issa:

On behalf of many publisher members of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers, the DC Principles Coalition, and other leading publishers, we are writing to express our strong opposition to the Federal Research Public Access Act, H.R. 5037. This bill would require that final manuscripts of peer-reviewed, private-sector journal articles reporting on federally-funded research be made freely available on government-run websites no later than six months after publication. This unnecessary legislation would undermine copyright and adversely impact the existing peer review system that ensures the high quality of scientific and other scholarly research in the United States. In addition, it would impose costly new mandates on federal agencies.


The diverse publishers whose concerns are shared by the undersigned are responsible for coordinating the publication of thousands of journals reporting on basic research and original scholarship, disseminating collectively tens of thousands of refereed research articles by U.S.-funded researchers annually. H.R. 5037 would diminish copyright protections for these private-sector scientific journal articles. The government mandate proposed by this legislation would result in the government distribution of copyrighted journal articles without compensation. Copyright is essential to protecting these works and to preserving incentives for the private sector to continue to invest in peer review, editing, publishing, and maintaining the electronic record of vetted scientific journal articles.


Commercial and not-for-profit publishers invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in the existing process of independent peer review. This important step in the publishing process ensures that all research articles undergo rigorous technical review by experts in specialized fields prior to publication. Although peer reviewers themselves are typically not paid, publishers incur considerable staff, capital, and operational costs to manage the peer review system and to meet the standards of excellence of hundreds of thousands of peer reviewers and journal editors. Publishers also provide the software and networked systems that enable authors to submit articles across the web, significantly decreasing the time to publication. Publishers have developed, deployed, and continue to refine complex systems that enable distributed groups of editors to manage the peer review process, track document flow, and balance workload among designated peer reviewers in leading centers around the world.

Publishers support reasonable efforts by the Federal Government to make the results of publicly-funded research widely available; however, H.R. 5037 takes the wrong approach. We strongly support the statutory directive to ensure broad access to the results of publicly-funded research as enacted by Congress approximately three years ago in the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act. Under that law, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is to provide meaningful public access to the results of NSF-funded research in a way that does not undermine copyright protections in private-sector journal articles. We also support ongoing studies and collaborations among key constituencies to understand and address this complex and controversial issue in a meaningful way that meets the broadest need without unintended negative consequences.


H.R. 5037 is unnecessary and duplicates existing mechanisms that enable the public to access research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities published in scholarly journals. It would require the affected federal agencies to develop and maintain costly electronic repositories. To do so, agencies will need to divert millions of dollars away from federal research grants and towards database costs. We strongly believe that the public benefits more when agency research dollars are spent on the advancement of knowledge through research and not on back-office administrative costs. There is no need for federal agencies to replicate content on their own sites when web-linking approaches to publishers’ authoritative versions could serve better the same goal of public access. Acting on its own in the free market, the publishing industry already has made more research information available to more people than at any time in history. Articles are widely available in major academic centers and private-sector online databases, as well as through public libraries, state universities and interlibrary loan programs. Many professional, academic and business organizations also provide professionals with access to the research literature.


By requiring the wholesale open posting of research articles on the web by essentially all major U.S. funding agencies, H.R. 5037 positions the government to become a competitor of independent publishers operating within the private sector in a well-established marketplace. By depositing articles in databases with no access controls, federal agencies would be asking the American taxpayer to subsidize the dissemination of information to anyone in the world with access to the Internet-- including those governments and corporations around the world that now purchase peer-reviewed research articles reporting on U.S.-funded research. University presses and smaller publishers, particularly professional associations that maintain one or few peer-reviewed journals as part of their scholarly mission, are concerned that their publishing activities would be jeopardized by the economic consequences of this proposed legislation. Such unintended consequences cannot be good for U.S research competitiveness. H.R. 5037 is a “one-way experiment” with attendant risks of failure and collateral damage that U.S. research simply cannot afford. For these reasons, we strongly oppose H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act.

Sincerely,

  • Acoustical Society of America
  • American Academy of Pediatrics
  • American Association of Anatomists
  • American Association for Cancer Research
  • American Association for Clinical Chemistry
  • American Association for Dental Research
  • American Association of Immunologists
  • American Association of Physics Teachers
  • American Astronomical Society
  • American Chemical Society
  • American College of Clinical Pharmacology
  • American College of Radiology
  • American Dairy Science Association
  • American Dental Association
  • American Geophysical Union
  • American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
  • American Institute of Biological Sciences
  • American Institute of Physics
  • American Medical Association
  • American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
  • American Psychological Association
  • American Physiological Society
  • American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists
  • American Roentgen Ray Society
  • American Society of Animal Science
  • American Society of Agronomy
  • American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
  • American Society for Investigative Pathology
  • American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
  • American Society of Plant Biologists
  • Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
  • AVS--Science &Technology of Materials, Interfaces and Processing
  • Cambridge University Press
  • Crop Science Society of America
  • Elsevier
  • The Endocrine Society
  • Entomological Society of America
  • European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery
  • Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
  • Genetics Society of America
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
  • International Association for Dental Research
  • International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB)
  • John Wiley and Sons
  • Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
  • The McGraw-Hill Companies
  • Mycological Society of America
  • The Optical Society
  • Oxford University Press
  • The Physiological Society
  • Poultry Science Association
  • Royal College of Psychiatrists
  • Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine
  • Society of Nuclear Medicine
  • Society for the Study of Reproduction
  • Soil Science Society of America
  • Springer Publishing Company
  • Thieme Publishers
  • University of Chicago Press
  • Wolters Kluwer Health

Cc: Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

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