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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*Â 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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Image via Wikipedia  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 Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Europe PMC Team

::: {dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;"}
As reported by Jennifer McLennan (Association of Research Libraries) on
the SPARC-OpenData mailing list:

[2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy
will persist]{style="font-weight: bold;"}

Washington, D.C. -- March 12, 2009 -- President Obama yesterday signed
into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a
provision making the National Institutes' of Health (NIH) Public Access
Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access
requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of
their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's
online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are
made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12
months after publication in a journal.

The NIH policy was previously implemented with a provision that was
subject to annual renewal. Since the implementation of the revised
policy the percentage of eligible manuscripts deposited into PMC has
increased significantly, with over 3,000 new manuscripts being deposited
each month. The PubMed Central database is a part of a valuable set of
public database resources at the NIH, which are accessed by more than 2
million users each day.
:::


As reported by Jennifer McLennan (Association of Research Libraries) on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list:  2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist  Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

First U.S. public access policy made permanent