The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable:Recommendations for Access to Federally

Funded Research

T. Scott PlutchakUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham

James J. O’DonnellGeorgetown University

November 6, 2010The Charleston Conference

[No competing interests]

Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

Convened by the Committee on Science and Technology of the United States House of Representatives, in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)

Issued report on January 12, 2010http://science.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=2710

Charge

“to explore and develop an appropriate consensus regarding access to and preservation of federally funded research information that addresses the needs of all interested parties.”

Participants

Academia Libraries Publishers

John Vaughn (AAU, Chair)

Ann Okerson (Yale) Y.S. Chi (Elsevier)

Richard McCarty (Vanderbilt)

T. Scott Plutchak (UAB) Mark Patterson (PLoS)

David Campbell (Boston )

Paul Courant (Michigan) Fred Dylla (AIP)

Jim O’Donnell (Georgetown)

Crispin Taylor (ASPB)

Researchers: Phil Davis (Cornell), Carol Tenopir (Tennessee) and Don King (UNC)

The debate

Zaporozhian Cossacks of Ukraine Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan. Oil painting by Elias Repin, 1878-91. 6'8" x

11'9".

Copyright © 1999 Andrew Gregorovich, Reprinted from FORUM Ukrainian Review No. 100, Summer 1999, Published by the Ukrainian Fraternal Association

Shared principles

Peer review must continue its critical role in maintaining high quality and editorial integrity.

Adaptable business models will be necessary to sustain the enterprise in an evolving landscape.

Scholarly and scientific publications can and should be more broadly accessible with improved functionality to a wider public and the research community.

Shared principles, cont’d

Sustained archiving and preservation are essential complements to reliable publishing methods.

The results of research need to be published and maintained in ways that maximize the possibilities for creative reuse and interoperation among sites that host them.

Core recommendation

Each federal research funding agency should expeditiously but carefully develop and implement an explicit public access policy that brings about free public access to the results of the research that it funds as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

• Agencies should work in full and open consultation with all stakeholders, as well as with OSTP, to develop their public access policies.

• Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access.

• Policies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability.

• Every effort should be made to have the version of record as the version to which free access is provided.

Additional Recommendations of Report

• Policies should foster innovation in the research and educational use of scholarly publications.

• Government public access policies should address the need to resolve the challenges of long-term digital preservation.

• OSTP should establish a public access advisory committee.

• 12 of 14 members fully endorsed report’s recommendations

• YS Chi (Elsevier) – recommendations call for too much government intervention

• Mark Patterson (PLoS) – recommendatioins don’t call for enough government intervention

• COMPETES Act -- Interagency Public Access Committee

– The America COMPETES Act (H.R. 5116): The America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act!

– principal provisions authorize increased funding for the NSF, DOE Office of Science, and NIST – National Institute of Standards and Technology

– HSTC added a section of the bill directing OSTP to establish a Public Access working group under the National Science and Technology Council

• Provisions: – coordinate the development of standards for research

data and reports to achieve interoperability across Federal science agencies and science and engineering disciplines

– coordinate Federal agency programs that support research and education to ensure preservation and stewardship of all forms of digital research data, including scholarly publications

– work with international counterparts to maximize interoperability between US and international research databases and repositories

– solicit input from, and collaborate with, non-Federal stakeholders

• Similar Interagency Committee provision in the Senate bill, reasonable chance of bill passing with this public access provision this year

Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)

• Consistent with recommendations…• But…– Rigid– Less emphasis on interoperability– Less emphasis on VoR– Lacks interagency oversight and

committee of stakeholders

Thanks to:

• Fred Dylla & John Vaughn, from whom I borrowed many of these slides

• All the roundtable members, from whom I learned so much!