Tag: research works act

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Chapter, Verse, and CHORUS: A first pass critique

And this is the chorus
This is the chorus
It goes round and around and gets into your brain
This is the chorus
A fabulous chorus
And thirty seconds from now you’re gonna to hear it again

This is the Chorus - Morris Major and the Minors

The Association of American Publishers have launched a response to the OSTP White House Executive Order on public access to publicly funded research. In this they offer to set up a registry or system called CHORUS which they suggest can provide the same levels of access to research funded by Federal Agencies as would the widespread adoption of existing infrastructure like PubMedCentral. It is necessary to bear in mind that this substantially the same group that put together the Research Works Act, a group with a long standing, and in some cases personal, antipathy to the success of PubMedCentral. There is therefore some grounds for scepticism about the motivations of the proposal.

However here I want to dig a bit more into the details of whether the proposal can deliver. I will admit to being sceptical from the beginning but the more I think about this, the more it seems that either there is nothing there at all –  just a restatement of already announced initiatives – or alternately the publishers involved are setting themselves up for a potentially hugely expensive failure. Let’s dig a little deeper into this to see where the problems lie.

First the good bits. The proposal is to leverage FundRef to identify federally funded research papers that will be subject to the Executive Order. FundRef is a newly announced initiative from CrossRef which will include Funder grant information within the core metadata that CrossRef collects and can provide to users and will start to address the issues of data quality and completeness. To the extent that this is a commitment from a large group of publishers to support FundRef it is a very useful step forward. Based on the available funding information the publishers would then signal that these papers are accessible and this information would be used to populate a registry. Papers that are in the registry would be made available via the publisher websites in some manner.

Now the difficulties. You will note two sets of weasel words in the previous paragraph: “…the available funding information…” and “…made available via the publisher websites in some manner”. The second is really a problem for the publishers but I think a much bigger one than they realise. Simply making the version of record available without restrictions is “easy” but ensuring that access works properly in the context of a largely paywalled corpus is not as easy as people tend to think. Nature Publishing Group have spent years sorting out the fact that every time they do a system update that they remove access to the genome papers that are supposed to be freely accessible. If publishers decide they just want to make the final author manuscripts available then they will have to build up a whole parallel infrastructure to provide these – an infrastructure that will look quite a lot like PubMedCentral in fact, leading to potential duplication of effort and potential costs. This is probably less of an issue for the big publishers but for small publishers could become a real issue.

Bad for the agencies

But its the first set of weasel words that are the most problematic. The whole of CHORUS seems to be based on assumption that the FundRef information will be both accurate and complete. Anyone who has dealt with funding information inside publication workflows knows this is far from true. Comparison of funder information pulled from different sources can give nearly disjunct sets. And we know that authors are terrible at giving the correct grant codes when they can bothered including them at all. The Executive Order and FASTR put the agencies on the hook to report on success, compliance, and the re-use of published content. It is the agencies who get good information in the long term on the outputs of projects they fund – information that is often at odds with what is reported in the acknowledgement sections of papers.

Put this issue of data quality alongside the fact that the agencies will be relying on precisely those organisations that have worked to prevent, limit, and where that failed slow down the widening of public access and we have a serious problem of mismatched incentives. For the publishers there is direct incentive to fail to solve the data quality issue at the front end – it lets them make less papers available. The agencies are not in a position to force this issue at paper submission because their data isn’t complete until the grant finally reports. The NIH already has high compliance and an operating system, precisely because they couple grant reports to deposition. Other agencies will struggle to catch up using CHORUS and will deliver very poor compliance based on their own data. This is not a criticism of FundRef incidentally. FundRef is a necessary and well designed part of the effort to solve this problem in the longer term – but it is going to take years for the necessary systems changes to work their way through and there a big changes required to submission and editorial management systems to make this work well. And this brings us to the problems for publishers.

Bad for the publishers

If the agencies agree to adopt CHORUS they will do so with these issues very clear in their minds. The Office of Management and Budget oversight means that agencies have to report very closely on cost-benefit analyses for new projects. This alongside the issues with incentive misalignment, and just plain lack of trust, means that the agencies will do two things: they will insist that the costs are firewalled onto the publisher side, and they will put strong requirements on compliance levels and completeness. If I were an agency negotiator I would place a compliance requirement of 60% on CHORUS in year one rising to 75% and 90% in years two and three and stipulate that that compliance will be measured against final grant reports on an ongoing basis. Where compliance didn’t meet the requirements the penalty would be for all the relevant papers from that publisher to be placed in PubMedCentral at the publisher’s expense. Even if they’re not this tough they are certainly going to demand that the registry be updated to include all the papers that got missed at the publisher’s expense necessitating an on-going manual grind of metadata update, paper corrections, index notifications. Bear in mind that if we generously assume that 50% of submitted papers have good grant metadata and the US agencies contribute to around 25% of all global publications that this means around 10% of the entire corpus will need to be updated year on year, probably through a process of semi-automated and manual reconciliation. If you’ve worked with agency data then you know its generally messy and difficult to manage – this is being worked on by building shared repositories and data systems that leverage a lot of the tooling provided by PubMed and PubMedCentral.

Alternately this could be a “triggering event” meaning that content would become available in the archives like CLOCKSS and PORTICO because access wasn’t properly provided. Putting aside the potential damage to the publisher brand if this happens, and the fact that it destroys the central aim of CHORUS – to control the dissemination path – this will also cost money. These archives are not well set up to provide differential access to triggered content, they release whole journals when a publisher goes bust. It’s likely that a partial trigger would require specialist repository sites to be set up to serve the content – again sites that would like an awful lot like PubMedCentral. The process is likely to lead to significantly more trigger events, requiring these dark repositories to function more actively as publishers, raising costs, and requiring them to build up repositories to serve content that would look an awful lot like…well you get the idea.

Finally there is the big issue – this puts the costs of improving funding data collection firmly in the hands of CHORUS publishers and means it needs to be done extremely rapidly. This work needs to be done, but it would be much better done through effective global collaboration between all funders, institutions and publishers. What CHORUS has effectively done is offer to absorb the full cost of this transition. As noted above the agencies will firewall their contributions. You can bet that institutions – for whom CHORUS will not assist and might hamper their efforts to ensure the collection of research outputs – will not pay for it through increased subscriptions. And publishers who don’t want to engage with CHORUS will be unlikely to contribute. It’s also almost certain that this development process will be rushed and ham fisted and irritate authors even more than they already are by current submission systems.

Finally of course a very large proportion of federal money moves through the NIH. The NIH has a system in place, it works, and they’re not about to adopt something new and unproven, especially given the popularity of PubMedCentral as demonstrated by the public response to the Research Works Act. So publishers will have to maintain dual systems anyway – indeed the most likely outcome of CHORUS will be to make it easier for authors to deposit works into PubMedCentral, and easier for the NIH to prod them into doing so raising the compliance rates for the NIH policy and making them look even better on the annual reports to the White House, leading ultimately to some sharp questions about why agencies didn’t adopt PMC in the first place.

Bad for the user

From the perspective of an Open Access advocate putting access into the hands of publishers who have actively worked to limit access and invested vast sums of money in systems to limit and control access seems a bad idea. But that’s a personal perspective – the publishers in questions will say they are guiding these audiences to the “right” version of papers in the best place for them to consume it. But lets look at the incentives for the different players. The agencies are on the hook to report on usage and impact of their work. They have the incentives to insure that whatever systems are in place work well and provide access well. Subscription publishers? They have a vested interest in trying to show there is a lack of public interest, in tweaking embargoes so as to only make things available after interest has waned, in providing systems that are poorly resourced so page loads are slow, and in general making the experience as poor as possible. After all if you need to show you’re adding value with your full cost version, then its really helpful to be in complete control of the free version so as to cripple it. On the plus side it would mean that these publishers would almost certainly be forced to provide detailed usage information which would be immensely valuable.

…which is bad for the publishers…

The more I think about this, the less it seems to have been thought through in detail. Is it just a commitment to use FundRef? This would be a great step but it goes nowhere near even beginning to satisfy the White House requirements. If its more than that what is it? A registry? But that requires a crucial piece of metadata, which appears as “Licence Reference” in the diagram, that is needed to assert things are available. This hasn’t been agreed yet (I should know, I’ve been involved in drafting the description). And even when it is no piece of metadata can make sure access actually happens. Is it a repository that would guarantee access? No – that’s what the CHORUS members hate above all other things. Is it a firm contractual commitment to making those articles with agency grant numbers attached available? Not that I’ve seen, but even it were it wouldn’t address the requirements of either the Executive Order or FASTR. As noted above, the mandate applies to all agency funded research, not just those where the authors remembered to put in all the correct grant numbers.

Is it a commitment to ensuring the global collection of comprehensive grant information at manuscript submission? With the funding to make it happen – and the funding to ensure the papers become available - and real penalties if it doesn’t happen? With provision of comprehensive usage data for both subscription and freely available content? This is the only level at which the agencies will bite. And this is a horrendous and expensive can of worms.

In the UK we have a Victorian infrastructure for delivering water. It just about works but a huge proportion of the total just leaks out of the pipes – its not like we have a shortage of rain but when we have a “drought” we quickly run into serious problems. The cost of fixing the pipes? Vastly more than we can afford. What I think happened with CHORUS is what happens with a lot industry wide tech projects. Someone had a bright idea, and went to each player asking them whether they could deliver their part of the pipeline. Each player has slightly overplayed the ease of delivery, and slightly underplayed the leakage and problems. A few percent here and a few percent there isn’t a problem for each step in isolation – but along the whole pipeline it adds up to the point where the whole system simply can’t deliver. And delivering means replacing the whole set of pipes.

 

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A tale of two analysts

Understanding how a process looks from outside our own echo chamber can be useful. It helps to calibrate and sanity check our own responses. It adds an external perspective and at its best can save us from our own overly fixed ideas. In the case of the ongoing Elsevier Boycott we even have a perspective that comes from two opposed directions. The two analyst/brokerage firms Bernstein and Exane Paribas have recently published reports on their view of how recent events should effect the view of those investing in Reed Elsevier. In the weeks following the start of the boycott Elsevier’s stock price dropped – was this an indication of a serious structural problems in the business revealed by the boycott (the Bernstein view) or just a short term over reaction that provides an opportunity for a quick profit (the Exane view)?

Claudio Aspesi from Bernstein has been negative on Elsevier stock for sometime [see Stephen Curry’s post for links and the most recent report], citing the structural problem that the company is stuck in a cycle of publishing more, losing subscriptions, charging more, and managing to squeeze out a little more profit for shareholders in each cycle. Aspesi has been stating for some time that this simply can’t go on. He also makes the link between the boycott and a potentially increased willingness of libraries to drop subscriptions or abandon big deals altogether. He is particularly scathing about the response to the boycott arguing that Elsevier is continuing to estrange the researcher community and that this must ultimately be disastrous. In particular the report focuses on the claims management have made of their ability to shift the cost base away from libraries and onto researchers based on “excellent relations with researchers”.

The Exane view on the other hand is that this is a storm in a teacup [summary at John Baez’s G+]. They point to the relatively small number of researchers signing up to the boycott, particularly in the context of the much larger numbers involved in similar pledges in 2001 and 2007. In doing this I feel they are missing the point – that the environment of those boycotts was entirely different both in terms of disciplines and targeting but an objective observer might well view me as biased.

I do however find this report complacent on details – claiming as it does that the “low take-up of this petition is a sign of the scientific community’s improving perception of Elsevier”, an indication of a lack of real data on researcher sentiment. They appear to have bought the Elsevier line on “excellent relations” uncritically – and what I see on the ground is barely suppressed fury that is increasingly boiling over. It also focuses on OA as a threat – not an opportunity – for Elsevier, a view which would certainly lead me to discount their long term views on the company’s stock price. Their judgement for me is brought even further into question by the following:

“In our DCF terminal value, we capture the Open Access risk by assuming the pricing models flip to Gold Open Access with average revenue per article of USD3,000. Even on that assumption, we find value in the shares.”

Pricing the risk at this level is risible. The notion that Elsevier could flip to an author pays model by charging $US3000 an article is absurd. The poor take up of the current Elsevier options and the massive growth of PLoS ONE and clones at half this price sets a clear price point, and one that is likely a high water mark for journal APCs. If there is value in the shares at $3000 then I can’t help but feel there won’t be very much at a likely end point price well below $1000.

However both reports appear to me to fail to recognize one very important aspect of the situation – its volatility. As I understand it these firms make their names by being right when they take positions away from the consensus. Thus they have a tendency to report their views as certainties. In this case I think the situation could swing either way very suddenly. As the Bernstein report notes, the defection of editorial staff from Elsevier journals is the most significant risk. A single board defection from a middle to high ranking journal – or a signal from a major society journal that they will not renew an Elsevier contract – could very easily start a landslide that ends Elsevier’s dominance as the largest research publisher. Equally, nothing much could happen which would certainly likely lead to a short term rally in stock prices. But no-one is in a position to guess how this is going to play out.

In the long term I side with Aspesi – I see nothing in the overall tenor of Elsevier’s position statements that suggests to me that they really understand either the research community, the environment, or how it is changing. Their pricing model for hybrid options seems almost designed to fail. As mandates strengthen it appears the company is likely to continue to fight them rather than adapt. But to accept my analysis you need to be believe my view that the subscription business model is no longer fit for purpose.

What this shows, more than anything else, is that the place where the battle for change will ultimately be fought out is in stock market. While Elsevier continues to tell its shareholders that it can deliver continuing profit growth from scholarly publishing with a subscription business model – it will be trapped into defending that business model against all threats. The Research Works Act is a part of that fight – as will be attempts to block simple and global mandates by funders on researchers in other places. While the shareholders believe that the status quo can continue the senior management of the company is trapped by a legacy mindset. Until shareholders accept that the company needs to take a short-term haircut the real investment required for change seems unlikely. And I don’t meant a few million here or there. I mean a full year’s profits ploughed back into the company over a few years to allow for root and branch change.

The irony seems that large-scale change requires that the investors get spooked. For that to happen something has to go very publicly wrong. The uproar over the support of SOPA and RWA is not, yet, enough to convince the analysts beyond Aspesi that something is seriously wrong. It is an interesting question what would be. My sense is that nothing big enough will come along soon enough and that those structural issues will gradually come into play leading to a long term decline. It may be that we are very near “Peak Elsevier”. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

In case it is not obvious I am not competent to offer financial or investment advice and no-one should view the proceeding as any form of such. 

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The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Man's face screaming/shouting. Stubbly wearing...
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When the history of the Research Works Act, and the reaction against it, is written that history will point at the factors that allowed smart people with significant marketing experience to walk with their eyes wide open into the teeth of a storm that thousands of people would have predicted with complete confidence. That story will detail two utterly incompatible world views of scholarly communication. The interesting thing is that with the benefit of hindsight both will be totally incomprehensible to the observer from five or ten years in the future. It seems worthwhile therefore to try and detail those world views as I understand them.

The scholarly publisher

The publisher world view places them as the owner and guardian of scholarly communications. While publishers recognise that researchers provide the majority of the intellectual property in scholarly communication, their view is that researchers willingly and knowingly gift that property to the publishers in exchange for a set of services that they appreciate and value. In this view everyone is happy as a trade is carried out in which everyone gets what they want. The publisher is free to invest in the service they provide and has the necessary rights to look after and curate the content. The authors are happy because they can obtain the services they require without having to pay cash up front.

Crucial to this world view is a belief that research communication, the process of writing and publishing papers, is separate to the research itself. This is important because otherwise it would be clear that, at least in an ethical sense, that the writing of papers would be work for hire for the funders – and part and parcel of the contract of research. For the publishers the fact that no funding contract specifies that “papers must be published” is the primary evidence of this.

The researcher

The researcher’s perspective is entirely different. Researchers view their outputs as their own property, both the ideas, the physical outputs, and the communications. Within institutions you see this in the uneasy relationship between researchers and research translation and IP exploitation offices. Institutions try to avoid inflaming this issue by ensuring that economic returns on IP go largely to the researcher, at least until there is real money involved. But at that stage the issue is usually fudged as extra investment is required which dilutes ownership. But scratch a researcher who has gone down the exploitation path and then pushed gently aside and you’ll get a feel for the sense of personal ownership involved.

Researchers have a love-hate relationship with papers. Some people enjoy writing them, although I suspect this is rare. I’ve never met any researcher who did anything but hate the process of shepherding a paper through the review process. The service, as provided by the publisher, is viewed with deep suspicion. The resentment that is often expressed by researchers for professional editors is primarily a result of a loss of control over the process for the researcher and a sense of powerlessness at the hands of people they don’t trust. The truth is that researchers actually feel exactly the same resentment for academic editors and reviewers. They just don’t often admit it in public.

So from a researcher’s perspective, they have spent an inordinate amount of effort on a great paper. This is their work, their property. They are now obliged to hand over control of this to people they don’t trust to run a process they are unconvinced by. Somewhere along the line they sign something. Mostly they’re not too sure what that means, but they don’t give it much thought, let alone read it. But the idea that they are making a gift of that property to the publisher is absolute anathema to most researchers.

To be honest researchers don’t care that much about a paper once its out. It caused enough pain and they don’t ever want to see it again. This may change over time if people start to cite it and refer to it in supportive terms but most people won’t really look at a paper again. It’s a line on a CV, a notch on the bedpost. What they do notice is the cost, or lack of access, to other people’s papers. Library budgets are shrinking, subscriptions are being chopped, personal subscriptions don’t seem to be affordable any more.

The first response to this when researchers meet is “why can’t we afford access to our work?” The second is, given the general lack of respect for the work that publishers do, is to start down the process of claiming that they could do it better. Much of the rhetoric around eLife as a journal “led by scientists” is built around this view. And a lot of it is pure arrogance. Researchers neither understand, nor appreciate for the most part, the work of copyediting and curation, layout and presentation. While there are tools today that can do many of these things more cheaply there are very few researchers who could use them effectively.

The result…kaboom!

So the environment that set the scene for the Research Works Act revolt was a combination of simmering resentment amongst researchers for the cost of accessing the literature, combined with a lack of understanding of what it is publishers actually do. The spark that set it off was the publisher rhetoric about ownership of the work. This was always going to happen one day. The mutually incompatible world views could co-exist while there was still enough money to go around. While librarians felt trapped between researchers who demanded access to everything and publishers offering deals that just about meant they could scrape by things could continue.

Fundamentally once publishers started publicly using the term “appropriation of our property” the spark had flown. From the publisher perspective this makes perfect sense. The NIH mandate is a unilateral appropriation of their property. From the researcher perspective it is a system that essentially adds a bit of pressure to do something that they know is right, promote access, without causing them too much additional pain. Researchers feel they ought to be doing something to improve acccess to research output but for the most part they’re not too sure what, because they sure as hell aren’t in a position to change the journals they publish in. That would be (perceived to be) career suicide.

The elephant in the room

But it is of course the funder perspective that we haven’t yet discussed and looking forward, in my view it is the action of funders that will render both the publisher and researcher perspective incomprehensible in ten years time. The NIH view, similar to that of the Wellcome Trust, and indeed every funder I have spoken to, is that research communication is an intrinsic part of the research they fund. Funders take a close interest in the outputs that their research generates. One might say a proprietorial interest because again, there is a strong sense of ownership. The NIH Mandate language expresses this through the grant contract. Researchers are required to grant to the NIH a license to hold a copy of their research work.

In my view it is through research communication that research has outcomes and impact. From the perspective of a funder their main interest is that the research they fund generates those outcomes and impacts. For a mission driven funder the current situation signals one thing and it signals it very strongly. Neither publishers, nor researchers can be trusted to do this properly. What funders will do is move to stronger mandates, more along the Wellcome Trust lines than the NIH lines, and that this will expand. At the end of the day, the funders hold all the cards. Publishers never really did have a business model, they had a public subsidy. The holders of those subsidies can only really draw one conclusion from current events. That they are going to have to be much more active in where they spend it to successfully perform their mission.

The smart funders will work with the pre-existing prejudice of researchers, probably granting copyright and IP rights to the researchers, but placing tighter constraints on the terms of forward licensing. That funders don’t really need the publishers has been made clear by HHMI, Wellcome Trust, and the MPI. Publishing costs are a small proportion of their total expenditure. If necessary they have the resources and will to take that in house. The NIH has taken a similar route though technically implemented in a different way. Other funders will allow these experiments to run, but ultimately they will adopt the approaches that appear to work.

Bottom line: Within ten years all major funders will mandate CC-BY Open Access on publication arising from work they fund immediately on publication. Several major publishers will not survive the transition. A few will and a whole set of new players will spring up to fill the spaces. The next ten years look to be very interesting.

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Response to the RFI on Public Access to Research Communications

Have you written your response to the OSTP RFIs yet? If not why not? This is amongst the best opportunities in years to directly tell the U.S. government how important Open Access to scientific publications is and how to start moving to a much more data centric research process. You’d better believe that the forces of stasis, inertia, and vested interests are getting their responses in. They need to be answered.

I’ve written mine on public access and you can read and comment on it here. I will submit it tomorrow just in front of the deadline but in the meantime any comments are welcome. It expands on and discusses many of the same issues, specifically on re-configuring the debate on access away from IP and towards services, that have been in my recent posts on the Research Works Act.

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IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Dear Representatives Maloney and Issa,

I am writing to commend your strong commitment to the recognition of intellectual property contributions to research communication. As we move to a modern knowledge economy, supported by the technical capacity of the internet, it is crucial that we have clarity on the ownership of intellectual property arising from the federal investment in research. For the knowledge economy to work effectively it is crucial that all players receive fair recompense for the contribution of intellectual property that they make and the services that they provide.

As a researcher I like to base my work on solid data, so I thought it might interest you to have some quantitation of the level of contribution of IP that publishers make to the substance of scientific papers. In this, I have focussed on the final submitted version of papers after peer review as this is the version around which the discussion of mandates for deposition in repositories revolve. This also has the advantage of separating the typesetting and copyright in layout, clearly the property of the publishers from the intellectual substance of the research.

Contribution of IP to the final (post peer review) submitted versions of papers

Methodology: I examined the final submitted version (i.e. the version accepted for publication) of the ten most recent research papers on which I was an author along with the referee and editorial comments received from the publisher. For each paper I examined the text of the final submitted version and the diagrams and figures.  As the only IP of significance in this case is copyright the specific contributions that were searched for were text or elements of figures contributed by the publisher that satisfied the requirements for obtaining copyright. Figures that were re-used from other publications (where the copyright had been transferred to the other publisher and permission been obtained to republish) were not included as these were considered “old IP” that did not relate to new IP embodied in the specific paper under consideration. The text and figures were searched for specific creative contributions from the publisher and these were quantified for each paper.

Results: The contribution of IP by publishers to the final submitted versions of these ten papers, after peer review had been completed, was zero. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Not one single word, line, or graphical element was contributed by the publisher or the editor acting as their agent. A small number of single words, or forms of expression, were found that were contributed by external peer reviewers. However as these peer reviewers do not sign over copyright to the publisher and are not paid this contribution cannot be considered work for hire and any copyright resides with the original reviewers.

Limitations: This is a small and arguably biased study based on the publications I have to hand. I recommend that other researchers examine their own oeuvre and publish similar analyses so that effects of discipline, age, and venue of publication can be examined. Following such analysis I ask that researchers provide the data via twitter using the hashtag #publisheripcontrib where I will aggregate it and republish.

Data availability: I regret that the original submissions can not be provided as the copyright in these articles was transferred after acceptance for publication to the publishers. I can not provide the editorial reports as these contain material from the publishers for which I do not have re-distribution rights.

The IP argument is sterile and unproductive. We need to discuss services.

The analysis above at its core shows how unhelpful framing this argument around IP is. The fact that publishers do not contribute IP is really not relevant. Publishers do contribute services, the provision of infrastructure, the management of the peer review process, dissemination and indexing, that are crucial for the current system of research dissemination via peer reviewed papers. Without these services papers would not be published and it is therefore clear that these services have to be paid for. What we should be discussing is how best to pay for those services, how to create a sustainable market place in which they can be offered, and what level of service the federal government expects in exchange for the services it is buying.

There is a problem with this. We currently pay for these services in a convoluted fashion which is the result of historical developments. Rather than pay up front for publication services, we currently give away the intellectual property in our papers in exchange for publication. The U.S. federal and state governments then pay for these publication services indirectly by funding libraries to hire access back to our own work. This model made sense when the papers were physically on paper; distribution, aggregation, and printing were major components of the cost. In that world a demand side business model worked well and was appropriate.

In the current world the costs of dissemination and provision of access are as near to zero as makes no difference. The major costs are in the peer review process and preparing the paper in a version that can be made accessible online. That is, we have moved from a world where the incremental cost of dissemination of each copy was dominant, to a world where the first copy costs are dominant and the incremental costs of dissemination after those first copy costs are negligible. Thus we must be clear that we are paying for the important costs of the services required to generate that first web accessible copy, and not that we are supporting unnecessary incremental costs. A functioning market requires, as discussed above, that we have clarity on what is being paid for.

In a service based model the whole issue of IP simply goes away. It is clear that the service we would wish to pay for is one in which we generate a research communication product which provides appropriate levels of quality assurance and is as widely accessible and available for any form of use as possible. This ensures that the outputs of the most recent research are available to other researchers, to members of the public, to patients, to doctors, to entrepreneurs and technical innovators, and not least to elected representatives to support informed policy making and legislation. In a service based world there is no logic in artificially reducing access because we pay for the service of publication and the full first copy costs are covered by the purchase of that service.

Thus when we abandon the limited and sterile argument about intellectual property and move to a discussion around service provision we can move from an argument where no-one can win to a framework in which all players are suitably recompensed for their efforts and contributions, whether or not those contributions generate IP in the legal sense, and at the same time we can optimise the potential for the public investment in research to be fully exploited.

HR3699 prohibits federal agencies from supporting publishers to move to a transparent service based model

The most effective means of moving to a service based business model would be for U.S. federal agencies as the major funders of global research to work with publishers to assure them that money will be available for the support of publication services for federally funded researchers. This will require some money to be put aside. The UK’s Wellcome Trust estimates that they expect to spend approximately 1.5% of total research funding on publication services. This is a significant sum, but not an overly large proportion of the whole. It should also be remembered that governments, federal and state, are already paying these costs indirectly through overheads charges and direct support to research institutions via educational and regional grants. While there will be additional centralised expenditure over the transitional period in the longer term this is at worst a zero-sum game. Publishers are currently viable, indeed highly profitable. In the first instance service prices can be set so that the same total sum of money flows to them.

The challenge is the transitional period. The best way to manage this would be for federal agencies to be able to guarantee to publishers that their funded researchers would be moving to the new system over a defined time frame. The most straight forward way to do this would be for the agencies to have a published program over a number of years through which the publication of research outputs via the purchase of appropriate services would be made mandatory. This could also provide confidence to the publishers by defining the service level agreements that the federal agencies would require, and guarantee a predictable income stream over the course of the transition.

This would require agencies working with publishers and their research communities to define the timeframes, guarantees, and service level agreements that would be put in place. It would require mandates from the federal agencies as the main guarantor of that process. The Research Works Acts prohibits any such process. In doing so it actively prevents publishers from moving towards business models that are appropriate for today’s world. It will stifle innovation and new entrants to the market by creating uncertainty and continuing the current obfuscation of first copy costs with dissemination costs. In doing so it will damage the very publishers that support it by legislatively sustaining an out of date business model that is no longer fit for purpose.

Like General Motors, or perhaps more analogously, Lehman Brothers, the incumbent publishers are trapped in a business model that can not be sustained in the long term. The problem for publishers is that their business model is predicated on charging for the dissemination and access costs that are disappearing and not explicitly charging for the costs that really matter. Hiding the cost of one thing in a charge for another is never a good long term business strategy. HR3699 will simply prop them up for a little longer, ultimately leading to a bigger crash when it comes. The alternative is a managed transition to a better set of business models which can simultaneously provide a better return on investment for the taxpayer.

We recognise the importance of the services that scholarly publishers provide. We want to pay publishers for the services they provide because we want those services to continue to be available and to improve over time. Help us to help them make that change. Drop the Research Works Act.

Yours sincerely

Cameron Neylon

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