Publishers attack NIH deposit mandate; authors can fight back
Many big trade publishers and their associations have been fighting hard against open access generally and the NIH mandatory deposit policy specifically for quite some time, so it’s no surprise that they are continuing to battle the policy even after it has been signed into law.
According to Library Journal ’s Academic Newswire, the AAP released a statement objecting both to the policy itself, and to the congressional process that brought the policy into law.
“These issues were never examined by Congress because the statutory authority for the new policy was enacted as a rider on appropriations legislation without hearings or studies to assess its merits,” complained Allan Adler, AAP’s VP for legal and government affairs… “[The policy] undermines publishers’ ability to exercise their copyrights in the published articles…threatens the intellectual freedom of authors, including their choice to seek publication in journals that may refuse to accept proposed articles that would be subject to the new mandate,” he said.
Neither of these arguments is particularly compelling – or accurate – and why anyone would put spin on something as unsympathetic and unrelatable as statutory authority is beyond me.
Here’s SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph on the process that led to the law’s passage, also in LJ Newswire:
…the NIH itself conducted an extensive process of soliciting public opinion and comments before enacting the policy. Besides holding public meetings with stakeholder groups, including the publishing community, the NIH published the proposed policy in the Federal Register in 2004, and requested public comment. It received—and made public via its website—more than 6000 comments on the policy. The formulation of this policy has been transparent, straightforward, and has provided plenty of opportunities for all stakeholders to express their concerns, both to the NIH and to Congress.
Meanwhile, plenty of people have already explained why the assertion that Open Access will destroy peer review is false. Publishers mostly don’t fund peer review – colleges and universities do.
Nick Monfort has an excellent explanation of how the peer review process works and who pays for it at Grand Text Auto:
Scholarly and scientific journals differ from many other sorts of publications. Authors are not paid – in some cases, they pay in the form of per-article fees or fees for color illustrations and extra content. Articles are reviewed by other academics who determine if they should be published; these reviewers are also not paid. The work that people do as researchers, writers, and reviewers is effectively subsidized by whatever institution supports these people as faculty, staff, or students. In the case of pay-for-access journals, the same institutions that indirectly pay for important labor on a journal also must pay the for-profit company that runs the journal in order to gain exclusive access (that is, access not available to the public) to the final outcome.
Monfort then goes on to argue that authors and researchers can fight back by refusing to review for journals that are not open access. In my own recommendations to faculty authors, I water that down slightly, and say that they should consider the overall author rights policy at a journal when they decide where to review and where to publish. Maybe it’s a subscription journal published by a for-profit company, but that company has a relatively liberal copyright policy that permits authors to reuse their work, post their articles online, and deposit them in OA repositories. Still, I think his choice is admirable, and I hope that many authors will follow suit.
Very interresting approach regarding this NIH policy. Thanks for posting!
One wonders if publishers balk at having their works at Trinity College Dublin, Oxford, in New Delhi and the British Library as well as at the LOC?
Academic publishing is not the same as publishing a novel or an auto repair for dummies handbook! I greatly fear that the large European houses (no names need be mentioned, but one is Dutch and the other German) who have had libraries balk at their subscription costs recently might not try to “fight back” and attack both ILL and E-Reserve in response on US campuses.