SPARC comment on a draft Australian OA mandate

SPARC has released its December 20 comment on the draft OA mandate from the Australian Government Productivity Commission.  The public comment period ended on December 21.  (For background on this proposal, see my blog post from November 13, 2006.)  Excerpt:

SPARC enthusiastically commends the far-sighted draft recommendation of the Productivity Commission that "published papers and data from ARC and NHMRC-funded projects should be freely and publicly available" (Draft Finding 5.1). This is an important step that will be welcomed by all beneficiaries of research.

While your recommendation recognizes the tremendous potential to expand the impact of Australian research outputs, we encourage you to go a step further in delineating the kind of public policies that are needed. The experiences of other nations have demonstrated that the effectiveness of well-intended policies can easily be undermined by unnecessarily timid implementations. For example, the voluntary public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, implemented in May 2005, has resulted in deposit of less than five percent of eligible articles in NIH's digital repository. The agency is now evaluating steps to improve on this unfortunate outcome, but success has been delayed by years.

We believe that, in order to guarantee a better result, it would be useful if your report called for Australian public access policies that fall within these parameters:

• Research funders should include in all grants and contracts a provision reserving for the government relevant non-exclusive rights (as described below) to research papers and data.
• All peer-reviewed research papers and associated data stemming from public funding should be required to be maintained in stable digital repositories that permit free, timely public access, interoperability with other resources on the Internet, and long-term preservation. Exemptions should be strictly limited and justified.
• Users should be permitted to read, print, search, link to, or crawl these research outputs. In addition, policies that make possible the download and manipulation of text and data by software tools should be considered.
• Deposit of their works in qualified digital archives should be required of all funded investigators, extramural and intramural alike. While this responsibility might be delegated to a journal or other agent, to assure accountability the responsibility should ultimately be that of the funds recipient.
• Public access to research outputs should be provided as early as possible after peer review and acceptance for publication. For research papers, this should be not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This embargo period represents a reasonable, adequate, and fair compromise between the public interest and the needs of journals.

We also recommend that, as a means of further accelerating innovation, a portion of each grant be earmarked to cover the cost of publishing papers in peer-reviewed open-access journals, if authors so choose. This would provide potential readers with immediate access to results, rather than after an embargo period.

While SPARC is not in a position to evaluate whether Australian public access provisions should be limited to ARC and NHMRC, we believe the benefits apply to all publicly funded research. We urge that your recommendations with regard to public access be framed broadly....

PS:  In October 2006, the Productivity Commission recommended OA mandates for the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and since then both agencies have adopted strong OA policies.  See the ARC policy (c. December 3, 2006) and the NHMRC policy (c. December 8, 2006).

Update (12/25/06). See comments by Stevan Harnad and Arthur Sale on the SPARC letter.