Open Access Mandates: Ensuring Compliance

Three years ago, I wondered aloud how we should judge the success of an Open Access (OA) mandate. In particular, I wondered what level of compliance it was reasonable to expect a mandate to attain, and pointed out that OA advocates believe it is possible to achieve a 70% compliance rate within two years, if the mandate is compulsory.

It is therefore striking that, although the Wellcome Trust has had a compulsory mandate in place since 2006, The Times Higher Education reported in March that the Trust is still only achieving a 55% compliance rate. As a result, The Times Higher added, Wellcome’s head of digital services Robert Kiley wants to get tough on those who do not comply. The current situation, said Kiley, is “simply not acceptable”.

Elsewhere, Nature reported that of the 55% of researchers who comply with Wellcome’s mandate, 85% do so by means of Gold OA. One benefit of Gold OA, presumably, is that the author can hope to pass responsibility for compliance over to the publisher. While this does require paying a Gold OA fee, the Trust will pay this fee for the researcher. However, that 85% figure might seem to suggest that authors are more reluctant to comply with a mandate than some assume.

In my 2009 blog post I also reported that when, in 2008, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) upgraded its request that researchers deposit their published papers into PubMed Central (PMC) into a requirement, compliance accelerated to 49% by the end of the year (from 19%).

In order to establish what level of compliance the NIH is achieving today, I contacted its Office of Extramural Research (ORE). Below is the (slightly edited) transcript of the email conversation I had, which was split over a number of emails.

The upshot is that the NIH is now achieving 75% compliance. 

This invites a question: Why is NIH proving more successful in achieving compliance than the Wellcome Trust? Here are some quick thoughts:

• NIH is the largest public funder of medical research in the world, and so perhaps has greater authority than the Wellcome Trust

• NIH has been more proactive in ensuring compliance

• Where the Wellcome Trust insists that any embargo imposed by a publisher is no longer than six months, the NIH still permits embargoes to be up to 12 months (so perhaps publishers are more willing to post NIH-funded papers in PMC?)

As I say, these are just initial thoughts. I welcome comments from others.

One thing I find noteworthy is that, while the NIH clearly takes a close interest in compliance levels, it does not collect statistics on enforcement actions. With the growth in compliance now apparently levelling off at NIH, this would surely be useful information — and not just for NIH itself, but also for other funders like the Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK  (RCUK), both of whom are currently looking to beef up their open access policies.

Q&A with NIH

RP: Can you give me some information on the current compliance rates for the NIH Public Access Policy, and explain how the NIH ensures compliance?

NIH: OSTP has submitted a report to Congress that included a current overview of the NIH policy, compliance level and impacts on Page 12.

Our current compliance efforts have been focused on outreach and engagement with institutions and publishers, as outlined on pages 3 and 4 of David Lipman's testimony to Congress in 2010.

RP: Ok, so after reading these documents I conclude the following:

1. The initial voluntary policy saw compliance rates of 19%.

2. The mandatory policy (introduced in April 2008) saw compliance grow to 49% by the end of 2008, 70% by the end of 2009 and currently stands at 75%.

3. In order to increase compliance the NIH has a) engaged in awareness programs; b) improved its ability to track papers resulting from NIH research awards; c) developed new systems to assist sponsored research offices at universities and medical research centres in tracking their compliance; d) improved the submission process for authors by i) co-opting publishers to deposit for authors and ii) introducing the NIH Manuscript Submission System.

NIH: To be clear, we introduced the NIH manuscript submission system in 2005. We have made modifications and improved our guidance, but it is not new.

We don't think it is accurate to say that we have 'co-opted' publishers, as the NIH policy does not apply to them.

RP:  Why do you think publishers agree to deposit papers for authors?

NIH: We generally hear three reasons why some publishers take an active role:

1) They want to be on PMC because of its high visibility, integration with other resources, and secure and free archiving — many journals do this for all their content, regardless of whether it falls under the NIH public access policy

2) They want to provide a service to their authors

3) They want greater control over the version posted to PMC (some want only the published version posted, and others want only the final peer-reviewed manuscript posted)

Green or Gold?

RP: Can you say what percentage of the papers deposited in PubMed Central are papers that have been published in a subscription journal and then self-archived (i.e. Green OA) and what percentage have been published in an OA journal for a fee (i.e. Gold OA)?

NIH: We do not characterize PubMed Central (PMC) deposits in terms of green and gold Open Access (OA). PMC is more than a repository for papers resulting from NIH-funded research.  See here.

All 2.4 million PMC articles are available without charge on PMC. This number includes about 225,000 author manuscripts, and the rest are final published versions that have been provided to PMC by publishers.

We do not have a simple way of generating counts of which papers are from subscription based journals and which are not. However, to put the above numbers in context, note also that close to half of the articles in PMC are from the digitized (scanned) issues of journals from the period between the mid-1800s and the mid to late 1990s — predating the birth of OA journals and the NIH public access policy.

About 450,000 articles make up the PMC OA subset. The term Gold OA generally refers to articles that are available under a very open license (such as CC-BY) and involve an open access fee charged to authors. The articles in the PMC OA subset come with a variety of licenses, not just CC-BY.

In addition, some of these OA articles are from journals that, to our knowledge, don't charge an OA fee — the Rockefeller Press journals, for example here. 

Enforceable?

RP:  I came across a message on the Liblicence mailing list recently from someone who appeared to have concluded that there is no real force behind the NIH policy. Would it be accurate to say that the NIH currently has no way of enforcing compliance?

NIH: The NIH Public Access policy is a term and condition of award.  As we state in our FAQ: A grantee's failure to comply with the terms and conditions of award may cause NIH to take one or more enforcement actions, depending on the severity and duration of the non-compliance. NIH will undertake any such action in accordance with applicable statutes, regulations, and policies.

NIH generally will afford the grantee an opportunity to correct the deficiencies before taking enforcement action unless public health or welfare concerns require immediate action.

However, even if a grantee is taking corrective action, NIH may take proactive action to protect the Federal government's interests, including placing special conditions on awards or precluding the grantee from obtaining future awards for a specified period, or may take action designed to prevent future non-compliance, such as closer monitoring. See Enforcement Actions in the NIH Grants Policy Statement (11/03).

RP: Can you tell me how many researchers have received research funds for the last five years, and then give me annual figures on enforcement actions that have been taken against researchers who have  failed to comply with the public access policy. E.g. how many enforcement letters have been sent out, how many researchers have had special conditions placed on their awards, and how many have been precluded from obtaining future awards for a specified period (and for how long a period)?

NIH: We funded over 228,000 grants in the past 5 years, which support hundreds of thousands of investigators. NIH public access policies have been developed centrally, and compliance activities are carried out by individual NIH institutes and centers.

There are currently terms and conditions which require institutions to comply with the public access policy. When an investigator is found out of compliance with the NIH public access policy, the NIH institute or center in which the award resides will send out letters to bring the investigator into compliance.

NIH does not currently collect statistics on compliance efforts.

The OA interviews: Carlos Rossel, Publisher at the World Bank

Carlos Rossel

“The Bank is committed to sharing our data, knowledge and analysis with others in the search for development solutions. By making Bank research and knowledge products published by the Bank available libre OA, third parties are free to use, reuse, and build upon the Bank’s work in ways that can lead to innovative solutions to local development problems.”

When Jim Yong Kim takes office as the new president of the World Bank on 1^st July, he will be the first development professional to head the Bank. That is new. But it is not all that is new at the World Bank. The new president will inherit an organisation that has undergone a lot of navel gazing over the past few years. Its conclusion: the Bank needs to rethink the way it operates.

The outgoing president of the Bank Robert Zoellick gave some insight into the Bank’s internal deliberations in a speech at Georgetown University in September 2010. Significantly, Zoellick acknowledged that pushing top-down economic solutions that were baked in the West on developing countries can no longer be viewed as adequate.

In his speech — entitled “Democratising Development Economics” — Zoellick pointed out that “modern portfolio theories” of economics have too often failed to deliver on their claims. The hubris behind such claims, he added, “turned to humility in the 2007 sub-prime crisis that led to the global economic crisis.”

To underline his point, Zoellick said, “AHe asccording to its risk model, one investment bank suffered a loss on several consecutive days that should only have occurred once in 14 life-spans of our universe.”

The discrediting of established thinking by the global crisis, said Zoellick, has obvious implications for development economics. In fact, he added, even before the crisis “there was a questioning of prevailing paradigms and a sense that development economics needed rethinking. The crisis has only made that more compelling.”

What has become apparent, Zoellick said, is that development economics needs, “to reach out to better encompass the experiences of successful emerging economies not with ordered templates or with blueprints, not with prescriptions for prescriptees, but inquiringly, cooperatively, openly.”

World Bank to Introduce Open Access Policy

The World Bank has announced today that it is introducing an Open Access (OA) policy. This will mandate that World Bank research outputs and knowledge products are deposited in a newly-created institutional repository called the Open Knowledge Repository (OKR), which will be freely accessible on the Internet.

In addition, the Bank will become the first major international organisation to make much of its research output available under Creative Commons licensing. As a result, any user in the world will be able to read, download, save, copy, print, reuse and link to the full text of the World Bank’s work, free of charge.

The new policy — effective July 1^st — will cover monographs (i.e., books, reports, etc.), externally-published sections or chapters of books written by Bank staff, working papers, journal articles, economic and sector work, plus associated datasets.

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs. Its official goal is to reduce poverty and support development. 

RUP’s Mike Rossner: Doing what’s right

Scholarly publishing is going through some hectic times. At the beginning of the year it was engulfed in the controversy over the Research Works Act (RWA), which would have rolled back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, and forbidden other federal agencies from introducing similar policies.

Mike Rossner

Confronted by an outcry from the research community, publishers began to distance themselves from the act, or they dithered, and the saga ended in a big win for the Open Access (OA) movement.

Hot on the heels of the RWA comes the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). This would achieve the very opposite of the RWA: It would strengthen the NIH Policy by reducing the embargo period before research papers must be made freely available online, from 12 months to six months; and it would require that all the major agencies of the federal government introduce the new strengthened policy.

Right now the FRPAA is still alive and kicking, but under attack from publishers, who have described it as “little more than an attempt at intellectual eminent domain, but without fair compensation to authors and publishers.”

As the war of words between OA advocates and publishers begins anew, one publisher stands out for taking an independent line — the executive director of Rockefeller University Press (RUP) Mike Rossner. In fact, this is not the first time that Rossner has disagreed with other publishers (e.g. see here, here and here), but it is always refreshing (not to say liberating) when one witnesses individuals standing out from the crowd.

True to form, Rossner has released a letter to librarians outlining his position in the current debate. Yesterday he forwarded the letter to me and invited me to share it, which I am happy to do. As I felt the letter invited a few questions I put those to Rossner first. The short Q&A can be read below the letter.

I am reminded of what Rossner told SPARC in 2009, when he was honoured as a SPARC Innovator: “I don’t see myself as going against the grain, I see myself as doing what’s right.”

What is undeniable is that if all scholarly publishers approached the world in the way that Mike Rossner does, a great many more research papers would be freely accessible on the Web today!

Dear Librarian,

I am writing to clarify the position of The Rockefeller University Press (RUP) on various legislative efforts regarding public access to publications resulting from federally funded research. RUP is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), who have both recently provided position statements on this issue. However, RUP does not agree with those statements.

RUP is a subscription-based publisher that publishes three biomedical research journals: The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, and The Journal of General Physiology. We have released our back content to the public since 2001 – long before any federal mandates existed – because we believe we have an obligation to give something back to the public that funds the research we publish.

The AAP supported the now-defunct Research Works Act. RUP strongly opposed that act.

Both the AAP and AAUP have opposed the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which has been re-introduced into both the House and Senate. Although numerous non-profit publishers signed the AAP letter, the RUP does not stand with those publishers. RUP supports FRPAA in principle.  We know from the NIH public access policy that mandated access to the results of federally-funded research is necessary to get certain publishers to release this content to the public, and we support legislation to extend the NIH policy to other large federal funding agencies.

The AAP and AAUP use a one-size-does-not-fit-all argument to oppose FRPAA because the drafted legislation calls for all large federal agencies to mandate public access six months after publication. Although it can be argued that a six-month embargo period may not be suitable for all disciplines covered by FRPAA, this is not grounds to oppose the legislation altogether. It should be supported in principle and could be modified during Congressional review to provide the flexibility for each agency to choose its own embargo period.

The continuing rhetoric from the AAP and AAUP about having ongoing "conversations" about access to the results of publicly funded research is outdated. There is legislation on the table that will help to make public access a reality now.

Yours sincerely,

Mike Rossner
Executive Director

These comments are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Rockefeller University.

Q&A:

RP:  I note that what you have sent me is a letter addressed to librarians. Can you say what your message is to RUP authors and readers?

MR: The note was addressed to librarians because it was sent to our list of institutional site managers. Our message is the same to RUP authors and readers.

RP:  You perhaps saw Stevan Harnad’s response to your letter? I know the term “public access” is widely used in the US, but has Stevan got a point? While members of the public clearly have an interest in ensuring that their tax dollars are spent effectively, is not the benefit of open access that it enables researchers to access each other’s papers, not that it allows the public to read them? Do you think these two issues are sometimes conflated?

MR: Stevan distinguished researcher access from public access. Since we release all of our back content to the public, the two are functionally equivalent from our perspective.

RP:  Would it be fair to conclude you feel that both the AAP and AAUP have lost sight of the big picture so far as scholarly communication is concerned, and that they can no longer see the wood for the trees when it comes to the issue of OA?

MR: I cannot speak to the perspectives of those organizations. I imagine that they believe their positions represent the opinions of the majority of their members, although I have not seen any polling data to this effect.

RP:  Given the apparent gulf that has opened up between RUP and both the AAP and AAUP, I am wondering what value there is in RUP remaining a member. Why does RUP not resign from these two organisations?

MR: I believe that there is value in presenting a dissenting opinion from within an organization. Being a member gives me a voice over communications networks to which I would otherwise not have access.

RP:  You say that RUP supports the FRPAA “in principle”. Can you say more about the reservations RUP has about the bill, which perhaps encompass more than the embargo period alone?

MR: My reservations encompass only the uniform embargo period. I strongly support the principle of mandated public access.

Open Access, brick by brick

Last month Elsevier withdrew its support for the controversial Research Works Act (RWA). Had it become law, the RWA would have rolled back the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requiring that funded researchers make their papers freely available on the Web within 12 months of publication. It would also have outlawed other US federal agencies from introducing similar policies. As such, the bill was a direct assault on Green Open Access. But while Elsevier’s retreat was a big win for supporters of Open Access (OA), OA will continue to be a brick-by-brick process — as evidenced by recent events in Australia.

In stepping away from the RWA, Elsevier acknowledged that it had made a strategic mistake. It clearly also made a serious PR gaffe. Whether the company has done lasting damage to its relationship with the research community remains uncertain, but the fact that researchers are continuing to sign up to the boycott Elsevier web site — created in protest at the publisher’s support for the bill — must clearly be a cause for concern.

What the RWA fiasco underlines is that while publishers are increasingly willing to embrace Gold OA (OA publishing), their antipathy towards Green OA (self-archiving) is growing, particularly where it is mandatory.

For that reason, Elsevier’s decision should be viewed as a political act alone, not a change of heart. Indeed, in announcing its withdrawal the publisher stressed that it remains firmly opposed to OA mandates.

Moreover, while OA advocates maintain that most publishers are now comfortable with the NIH policy this is surely only wish fulfilment. A week after the RWA died, after all, 81 publishers signed a letter opposing the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

Introduced into both the US Senate and the House of Representatives on 9^th February, far from outlawing the NIH policy, the FRPAA would propagate it — to around a dozen other US federal agencies. It would also reduce the embargo period from 12 months to six. As such, the bill would be a huge fillip for Green OA — although with the US elections approaching it seems highly unlikely to succeed, in the near future at least.

In short, the battle for OA goes on, but looks set to be fought primarily over Green OA henceforward.

Down under

Recent events on the other side of the globe would appear to confirm this. They also demonstrate that while the OA movement was victorious in the battle over the RWA, the war itself is far from over.

In a development generally under-reported outside Australia (pushed aside by the hubbub over the RWA perhaps), on 21st February the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) announced that it plans to introduce an NIH-style mandate — effective July 1st.

Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B?

To the intense joy of Open Access (OA) advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act (RWA). Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the two sponsors of the bill — Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) — would not be “taking legislative action” on the RWA. In short, the bill is now dead on its feet.

One person who took particular note of the news was Claudio Aspesi, a senior research analyst at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein. Aspesi tracks Elsevier for investors, so on Tuesday he published a new report on the company. While welcoming Elsevier's decision, Aspesi concluded, “Consensus is still treating Elsevier’s problems as cyclical, in spite of the rising evidence the issues are deeper”. So when I received a copy of the report I took it as a sign that it was time to re-interview Aspesi. The interview follows my own thoughts on the current situation below.

Claudio Aspesi

The RWA was introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year. Had it become law, the bill would have reversed the 2005 National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online within 12 months of publication. It would also have prevented other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers.

In short, the RWA would have been a serious setback for the OA movement. But the danger has been averted.

Sadly for Elsevier, however, its flirtation with the RWA appears to have wreaked havoc on its relationship with the research community. The blogosphere has been alive with criticism of the publisher, several petitions were launched to stop the bill and, most damagingly, in January a blog post by highly regarded Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers sparked a boycott of the company, with thousands of researchers pledging that henceforth they will not publish in, or referee and/or perform editorial services for any Elsevier journals.

It is important to note, however, that this anger was not just over Elsevier’s support for the RWA. It was soon apparent that researchers have a number of historic grievances against the company, grievances that were reawakened by its support for the bill.

The boycott site (Cost of Knowledge) lists a number of these grievances, including the complaint that Elsevier charges “exorbitantly high prices” and that it has used the Big Deal (aka journal bundling) as a way of forcing librarians to “agree to buy very large ‘bundles’” of journals, including “many journals that those libraries do not actually want.”

As such, the danger is that having opened Pandora’s Box, Elsevier may not be able to close it again, and its retreat from the RWA may fail to stem the tide of researchers joining the boycott. At the time of writing, the number who had pledged to shun the publisher had grown to 7,690, and continues to grow by the hour.

Given the PR crisis it sparked, and the embarrassing climb-down that Elsevier has had to make, one is bound to wonder why the publisher ever supported the RWA in the first place.

Ask Elsevier why and it will tell you that self-archiving mandates like the NIH policy represent an unfair threat to its business — by depriving it of vital subscription revenue it needs to fund the publishing of research papers. It also claims that the NIH policy amounts to unwarranted government interference in the market.

But is it true that self-archiving mandates inevitably cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, as Elsevier claims? This is far from self-evident.

Elsevier steps away from Research Works Act

Elsevier has today posted a statement on its web site indicating that it no longer supports the Research Works Act (RWA). 

Michael Eisen design

The news follows an outcry against the publisher for supporting the bill, and the launch of a site encouraging researchers to commit to boycott Elsevier. Currently the number of researchers who have signed on to the boycott is approaching 7,500.

I attach some excerpts from Elsevier's statement below:

At Elsevier, we have always focused on serving the global research community and ensuring the best possible access to research publications and data. In recent weeks, our support for the Research Works Act has caused some in the community to question that commitment.

We have heard expressions of support from publishers and scholarly societies for the principle behind the legislation. However, we have also heard from some Elsevier journal authors, editors and reviewers who were concerned that the Act seemed inconsistent with Elsevier’s long-standing support for expanding options for free and low-cost public access to scholarly literature. That was certainly not our intention in supporting it. This perception runs counter to our commitment to making published research widely accessible, coming at a time when we continue to expand our access options for authors and develop advanced technologies to enable the sharing and distribution of research results.
... 

While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area, Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself. We hope this will address some of the concerns expressed and help create a less heated and more productive climate for our ongoing discussions with research funders.
... 

"We are ready and willing to work constructively and cooperatively to continue to promote free and low-cost public access through a variety of means, as we have with research funders and other partners around the world.

The full statement can be read here.

UPDATE: Elsevier has today also published a Letter to the Mathematics Community. Amongst other things, this addresses the issues of pricing, open access and the RWA.

FURTHER UPDATE: Elsevier's vice president marketing communications Chrysanne Lowe has posted a message to the library community on the Liblicense mailing list.

The message confirms that Elsevier has withdrawn its support for the RWA, and ends, "We recognize that the recent legislative debate is far from the only issue at hand. We acknowledge that, as the largest of the commercial publishers, we take a sizable share of your serials budget. However, relative to our competitors, we are also confident that we deliver a significant share of value in terms of articles, usage, citations, and improved research productivity."

FURTHER UPDATE:  Alexander Howard reports that he has received a joint statement from the sponsors of the RWA -- Reps. Darrell Issa and Carolyn B. Maloney -- saying that they "will not be taking legislative action" on the RWA. The statement adds:

As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future. The transition must be collaborative, and must respect copyright law and the principles of open access. The American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid. This conversation needs to continue and we have come to the conclusion that the Research Works Act has exhausted the useful role it can play in the debate.