[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
PUBLIC ACCESS TO FEDERALLY-FUNDED RESEARCH
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON INFORMATION POLICY,
CENSUS, AND NATIONAL ARCHIVES
of the
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JULY 29, 2010
__________
Serial No. 111-114
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov
http://www.oversight.house.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York, Chairman
PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania DARRELL E. ISSA, California
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York DAN BURTON, Indiana
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland JOHN L. MICA, Florida
DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia
DIANE E. WATSON, California PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
JIM COOPER, Tennessee JIM JORDAN, Ohio
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
MIKE QUIGLEY, Illinois JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska
MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of AARON SCHOCK, Illinois
Columbia BLAINE LUETKEMEYER, Missouri
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island ANH ``JOSEPH'' CAO, Louisiana
DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
HENRY CUELLAR, Texas
PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire
CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut
PETER WELCH, Vermont
BILL FOSTER, Illinois
JACKIE SPEIER, California
STEVE DRIEHAUS, Ohio
JUDY CHU, California
Ron Stroman, Staff Director
Michael McCarthy, Deputy Staff Director
Carla Hultberg, Chief Clerk
Larry Brady, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri, Chairman
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia
Columbia JOHN L. MICA, Florida
DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah
STEVE DRIEHAUS, Ohio
HENRY CUELLAR, Texas
JUDY CHU, California
Darryl Piggee, Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on July 29, 2010.................................... 1
Statement of:
Adler, Allan, vice president, Government and Legal Affairs,
Association of American Publishers; Steven J. Breckler,
Ph.D., executive director for science, American
Psychological Association; Ralph Oman, Pravel professorial
lecturer in intellectual property law and fellow, the
Creative and Innovative Economy Center, George Washington
University Law School...................................... 9
Adler, Allan............................................. 9
Breckler, Steven J....................................... 23
Oman, Ralph.............................................. 31
Lipman, David J., M.D., Director, National Center for
Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine,
National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services......................................... 132
Roberts, Richard, Ph.D., F.R.S., chief scientific officer,
New England Biolabs; Sharon F. Terry, president and CEO,
Genetic Alliance; Elliot Maxwell, director, Digital
Connections Council, Committee for Economic Development;
Sophia Colamarino, vice president, research, Autism Speaks;
David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs,
Association of Public and Land Grant Universities; and
Catherine Nancarrow, managing editor, Public Library of
Science Community Journals................................. 51
Colamarino, Sophia....................................... 76
Maxwell, Elliot.......................................... 63
Nancarrow, Catherine..................................... 102
Roberts, Richard......................................... 51
Shulenburger, David...................................... 90
Terry, Sharon F.......................................... 58
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Adler, Allan, vice president, Government and Legal Affairs,
Association of American Publishers, prepared statement of.. 12
Breckler, Steven J., Ph.D., executive director for science,
American Psychological Association, prepared statement of.. 25
Clay, Hon. Wm. Lacy, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Missouri, prepared statement of................... 3
Colamarino, Sophia, vice president, research, Autism Speaks,
prepared statement of...................................... 78
Lipman, David J., M.D., Director, National Center for
Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine,
National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services, prepared statement of.................. 135
Maxwell, Elliot, director, Digital Connections Council,
Committee for Economic Development, prepared statement of.. 65
Nancarrow, Catherine, managing editor, Public Library of
Science Community Journals, prepared statement of.......... 104
Oman, Ralph, Pravel professorial lecturer in intellectual
property law and fellow, the Creative and Innovative
Economy Center, George Washington University Law School,
prepared statement of...................................... 33
Roberts, Richard, Ph.D., F.R.S., chief scientific officer,
New England Biolabs, prepared statement of................. 53
Shulenburger, David, vice president for academic affairs,
Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, prepared
statement of............................................... 92
Terry, Sharon F., president and CEO, Genetic Alliance; Elliot
Maxwell, director, Digital Connections Council, Committee
for Economic Development, prepared statement of............ 60
PUBLIC ACCESS TO FEDERALLY-FUNDED RESEARCH
----------
THURSDAY, JULY 29, 2010
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and
National Archives,
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 3 p.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Wm. Lacy Clay
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Clay, Maloney, Chu, and Chaffetz.
Staff present: Darryl Piggee, staff director/counsel;
Yvette Cravins, counsel; Frank Davis and Anthony Clark,
professional staff members; Charisma Williams, staff assistant;
Marc Johnson, assistant clerk--full committee; Adam Hodge,
press secretary--full committee; Justin LoFranco, minority
press assistant and clerk; and Mark Marin, minority senior
professional staff member.
Mr. Clay. The subcommittee will come to order.
Good afternoon, and welcome to today's hearing entitled,
``Public Access to Federally-Funded Research.'' Without
objection, the chairman and ranking minority member will have 5
minutes to make opening statements, followed by opening
statements not to exceed 3 minutes by any other Member who
seeks recognition. And without objection, Members and witnesses
may have 5 legislative days to submit a written statement or
extraneous materials for the record.
The purpose of today's hearing is to examine the current
state of public access to federally funded research and to
discuss the potential implications of increased access. Every
year, the Federal Government, using taxpayer dollars, funds
tens of billions of dollars in basic and applied research. Most
of the funding is concentrated within 11 Federal departments
and/or agencies.
So while this is not a legislative hearing attached to any
particular bill, there has been much interest, deservedly so,
surrounding this topic on both sides of the issue of how much
access should the public have to federally funded research, how
would increased access affect grantees, researchers and
scholars.
To that end, I determined that the subcommittee should
allow an atmosphere for dialog and discussion of public access
to federally funded research. It is relevant, current and
within the purview of this subcommittee. So today we will hear
testimony from stakeholders in the areas of publishing, science
research, education and patient advocacy.
This hearing will also examine the operational processes
utilized by the National Institutes of Heath in its open access
program, including but not limited to the submission process,
data usage, embargo time period and compliance information. We
will examine how the National Institutes of Health has been
affected by the congressional mandate to ensure that the public
has access to the published results of NIH-funded research no
later than 12 months after publication. What have been the
results and ramifications, positive and negative, of that
policy to the stakeholders?
I thank all of our witnesses for appearing today and look
forward to their testimony. I now recognize the distinguished
ranking minority member, Mr. Chaffetz of Utah. Mr. Chaffetz.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Wm. Lacy Clay follows:]
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Mr. Chaffetz. Thank you, and thanks to the various
witnesses that are here today. We appreciate your flexibility
and understanding with all the votes and other hearings and
things that are going on here prior to the recess. I appreciate
your patience.
And I appreciate your holding this hearing.
I am looking forward to hearing the exchange from our
witnesses. The extraordinary expansion of access to digital
information over the past decade has caused heated debate to
arise over the issue of public access to federally funded
research results. The Federal Government funds billions of
dollars in research every year, much of it in the form of
grants to researchers.
Typically, researchers write one or more manuscripts
detailing the findings of the research in hopes of having them
published as articles in scientific journals. Journal
publishers subject these submitted manuscripts to a vigorous
peer-reviewed process to ensure that the scientific results and
conclusions are valid prior to selection for publication.
In exchange for the costs associated with peer review,
editing, publication of the manuscript, the researcher
typically assigns his or her copyright to the journal
publisher. Historically, Congress has directed that federally
funded researchers retain expansive intellectual property
rights, to encourage the advancement and distribution of
scientific knowledge as widely as possible. This system has
proven highly successful in allowing researchers from
universities in the United States and across the world access
to new and constantly evolving scientific information from
which they can pursue new discoveries and innovations.
There are now more than 25,000 peer-reviewed journals
worldwide, produced by more than 2,000 publishers, ranging from
the well-known, such as Nature or the New England Journal of
Medicine to one of my own personal favorites, and I know
something that all good Americans subscribe to, the Journal on
Matrix Analysis and Applications, which publishes articles of
interest to the numerical linear algebra community. You
subscribe, don't you, Mr. Chairman? [Laughter.]
I will share my copy with you.
In the United States, the scholarly publishing enterprise
provides direct employment for roughly 33,000 people.
I am sympathetic to the arguments that proponents of the
increased public and free access to federally funded research
make regarding the rights of taxpayers to the results of that
research. They paid for it, and they should be able to access
the fruits of that research.
However, journal publishers invest a significant amount of
money and provide a valuable service to the scientific
community and the Nation in peer-reviewed editing, publication
and dissemination of researched articles. According to
estimates made by the publishing community, the National
Institutes of Health funded research results in approximately
85,000 journal published articles annually. By the time a final
peer-reviewed manuscript is completed, the point at which NIH
requires submission under their current rules, publishers
estimate that they have invested in excess of $1,400 per
article, or roughly $126 million annually.
I am concerned about the Federal Government mandating free
access policies, such as the current one at NIH, that
diminished copyright protections for private sector journal
articles, also particularly with regard to some of the smaller
non-profit professional organizations that publish only one or
two journals. I am concerned about their ability to stay in the
publishing game, and their willingness to invest in the
vigorous peer-review process that currently makes our
scientific enterprise so vibrant without strong copyright
incentives.
One thing I hope we all keep in mind, there are many
alternatives to the type of policy currently employed at the
National Institutes of Heath in which H.R. 5037, which has been
referred to this subcommittee, would expand to other Federal
research funding agencies. These alternatives policies would
strike an appropriate balance between the taxpayer access to
the results of federally funded research and the copyright
incentives and protections of the publishers.
For example, in the 2007 America Competes Act, Congress
directed the National Science Foundation to develop a system
whereby research reports, including readily accessible summary
of the outcomes of the NSF-sponsored research, are disseminated
instead of copyrighted materials for the publishers. Again, it
is a complex issue. There are a variety of directions in which
we can go.
And thus, I think the hearing is very appropriate and I
look forward to hearing from all of the witnesses today. I
appreciate your preparation. And I assure you, given the
schedule, all of the information will be properly reviewed.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chaffetz.
If there are no more opening statements, I will now
introduce our first panel. On this panel, we will hear from Mr.
Allan Adler. Mr. Adler is the vice president of Legal and
Government Affairs with the Association of American Publishers.
Welcome.
Our next witness will be Dr. Steven Breckler. Dr. Breckler
is a graduate of the University of California at San Diego and
received his masters and Ph.D. from Ohio State University. He
is the author of numerous publications and articles in the area
of psychology. He has served as an assistant professor at Johns
Hopkins and as program director of the National Science
Foundation. He is currently the executive director at the
American Psychology Association. Thank you for being here.
Our third witness will be Professor Ralph Oman. Mr. Oman
teaches copyright law at the George Washington University Law
School. He also serves as a fellow on the faculty of the Law
School's Creative and Innovative Economy Center. Mr. Oman
served as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary
Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks. He is a
graduate of Hamilton College in Georgetown University Law
Center.
I want to welcome all of you and thank you for being here
today. It is the policy of the subcommittee to swear in all
witnesses before they testify. Would you all please stand and
raise your right hands?
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Clay. Thank you . You may be seated. Let the record
reflect the witnesses answered in the affirmative.
Each witness will have 5 minutes to make opening
statements. Your complete written testimony will be included in
the hearing record. The lighting system in front of you will
indicate how much time you have left. When it turns red, we
would like for you to cease and desist.
Mr. Adler, you may begin.
STATEMENTS OF ALLAN ADLER, VICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENT AND LEGAL
AFFAIRS, ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS; STEVEN J.
BRECKLER, PH.D., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOR SCIENCE, AMERICAN
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION; RALPH OMAN, PRAVEL PROFESSORIAL
LECTURER IN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW AND FELLOW, THE CREATIVE
AND INNOVATIVE ECONOMY CENTER, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW
SCHOOL
STATEMENT OF ALLAN ADLER
Mr. Adler. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the
subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to participate in this
hearing on behalf of the Association of American Publishers,
principal trade association of the U.S. book publishing
industry, whose for-profit and non-profit members publish
books, journals and other literary works in every field of
human interest, both in print and digital formats.
Relative to today's hearing, AAP's membership includes some
50 for-profit companies and non-profit organizations that
publish scientific, technical and medical journals in both
print and digital formats. Because I have submitted a written
statement for the record, let me just briefly identify a few
key points.
First, as we discuss federally funded research, you will
hear references to peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly
publications as well as characterizations of those items as the
results or products of federally funded research. Such
characterizations, however, are not accurate, and they are
particularly misleading in the context of today's discussion.
It is critical that you keep in mind the distinction between
federally funded research and the private sector journal
articles that are written by the funded researchers to report
and document that research.
The peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals
are not themselves funded researchers. Nor are they
deliverables required under the terms of the funding grant, as
are, for example, the annual progress reports that the research
grantees typically require to submit to the funding agency.
Instead, they are separate reports on the funded research,
written with the express intention of publication in relevant
peer-reviewed journals to describe and explain the process,
findings and significance of the funded research that has been
conducted by the authoring researchers. These are prepared for
publication and ultimately published by peer-reviewed journals
without funding from the Government.
Second, the articles that are published in peer-reviewed
journals are ultimately collaborative products of the
researcher and the journal publisher, which devotes a
substantial amount of its editorial and other publishing
resources to ensuring that the final published version of the
researcher's account is accurate and that its significance is
understood within the context of other research in the same
field or related fields.
Journal publishers invest hundreds of millions of dollars
in peer review, editing and publishing processes, including for
sophisticated communications technologies and electronic
resources, support personnel and many part and full-time
editors. Publishers manage all stages of the peer-review
process from the time the journal publisher receives a new
manuscript until the final version is accepted for publication
as a journal article. Each manuscript undergoes rigorous review
by editors and technical experts prior to publication in a
resource-intensive process that helps ensure the quality and
integrity of these published accounts of scientific research.
Government mandates, like the NIH Public Access Policy,
which requires free online access to the author's final peer-
reviewed manuscript after acceptance for journal publication,
expropriate, or in simpler terms, take without consideration
the substantial investments that the publisher makes in
providing added value to the researcher's original manuscript.
And by doing so, they substantially weaken an area of our
economy where the United States has a distinct comparative
advantage over its competitors in global markets. Science and
technology publishers based in North America account for some
45 percent of all peer-reviewed scientific research papers
published annually worldwide. For many U.S. journal publishers,
over 50 percent of their revenues come from subscriptions
delivered outside U.S. borders.
But through mandates like the NIH policy, the government
intervenes to become the de facto publisher of the articles and
compete directly with the journal publisher in making them
available for public access and distribution. Even worse, this
unwarranted competition from the Government can lead to further
harm to the publishers by facilitating digital piracy, as we
have discovered with respect to evidence showing that companies
in China are reselling and distributing these journal articles
as downloaded from NIH's PubMed central data base without
authorization from the publisher.
While some may think such piracy is not the Government's
fault, the simple reality is that in today's digitally
networked world, the Government cannot presume to make these
copyrighted works freely available online to the U.S. taxpayer
without also giving them away free to the rest of the world,
including competing National governments, public and private
institutions, corporations and yes, pirates, all of whom, with
the exception of the pirates, would otherwise probably acquire
these works from the journal publisher by subscription.
If someone can get these articles for free on a Government
Web site, why would they pay to subscribe to journals? Surveys
have shown that a significant number of librarians would be
likely to cancel their institutional subscriptions to journals
if the articles contained in them were accessible online for
free, even if the articles were not available for a year, and
even if not all the articles in the journal were available
online.
Thus, mandates like the NIH policy also undermine copyright
protection for journal articles, and diminish incentives for
publishers to continue making substantial investments in
managing the peer review process and otherwise improving
scientific communications and providing and maintaining non-
Government public filtered records of federally funded
research. Mr. Chairman, there are better approaches to
enhancing public access to the results of federally funded
research.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Adler follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much for your testimony.
Dr. Breckler, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF STEVEN J. BRECKLER
Dr. Breckler. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, I
am Dr. Steve Breckler, executive director for Science of the
American Psychological Association.
APA is the largest scientific and professional association
of psychologists in the United States. We are the world's
largest association of psychologists, with over 150,000
researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students as
members. APA is also the largest publisher of behavioral
science research, with 56 of the premier scholarly journals in
the field of psychology.
The mission of APA is to advance the creation,
communication and application of psychological knowledge to
benefit society and to improve people's lives. APA strongly
supports the goal of public access to federally funded
research.
What is not clear, however, is the best way to accomplish
the goal. The methods implemented to date, and the ones
currently under most active consideration, do not necessarily
represent the best possible methods. In fact, some carry
substantial risk of harming scientific scholarship and actually
impeding our ability to accomplish the ultimate goal of
enhancing public access to federally funded research.
As a citizen and as a scientist, I take enormous pride in
American science. I think we all do. We are the stewards of the
world's strongest and most vibrant system of scientific
research and scholarship. The last thing that any of us wants
to do is to harm or otherwise weaken American science. Our
Nation's most serious investments in science began over 60
years ago. It was recognized then that the Federal Government
was in the best position to provide the financial resources to
support science and research in this country. It was also
recognized then that the private sector and the non-profit
scholarly societies were in the best position to manage the
publication and dissemination of research results in this
country.
The Federal Government did not want to get into the
scholarly publishing business, nor did society demand it.
Indeed, it has always been the opposite, of maintaining a
separation between the Government and the final production of
scholarship, of protecting academic freedom and allowing
scholars in this country to do their work without Government
interference. The success of American science can be traced to
this formula, to this division of responsibility and management
of the scientific enterprise. It has served us extremely well.
And now for a variety of reasons that really have nothing
to do with scientific achievement and advancement, some among
us want to change the formula. Change can be a good thing. But
it should be well-reasoned and thoroughly researched before
wholesale implementation. A mistake could mean irreparable
damage, an outcome that none of us wants.
I have provided detail in our written testimony about some
of the potential risk of poorly developed public access
policies. Scholarly publishers add tremendous value to the
communication and dissemination of science. And we invest
enormous resources in the process. Yet the current public
misunderstanding is that those costs are either inconsequential
or that the Government already bears those costs. Neither is
true.
Alternative models for public access exist. NSF, for
example, requires its investigators to submit their final
project reports and citations to published research documents
resulting from their research for posting on the NSF public Web
site. This is consistent with the fact that taxpayers are
paying for the research results, not for the publications.
APA suggests that the current situation offers the
opportunity to conduct a natural experiment to evaluate the
various public access models currently in place. This
opportunity was recognized by OSTP when it noted in late 2009
that the NIH model has a variety of features that can be
evaluated, and there are other ways to offer the public
enhanced access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications.
Indeed, in its implementation of a public access policy,
NIH assumes that 12 months provides a sufficient embargo period
to allow publishers enough time to recoup their investment. Yet
as the data we provided in our written testimony demonstrates,
12 months is clearly too short a time for many publishers,
especially those in the social and behavioral sciences, to
recover even a fraction of their investments. In APA's
experience, less than 16 percent of the ultimate usage of a
journal article occurs within the first 12 months of
publication.
We can do better. We need to bring all stakeholders to the
table to develop a viable system of public access, one that
makes federally funded research accessible to the public, but
without sacrificing or harming the various scientific
infrastructure supported by the Federal Government and desired
by the public. This was the recommendation of the OSTP
scholarly publishing roundtable, and it is the basis for the
provision of the COMPETES bill currently working its way
through Congress to establish an interagency working group on
public access.
APA supports these recommendations, but we emphasize the
need to include the perspective of scientific societies that
publish social and behavioral science research. When it comes
to policies surrounding public access to federally funded
research, we must be thoughtful and careful and willing to take
the time and make the effort to do it right. Otherwise, we run
the real risk of reducing, rather than increasing, public
access to federally funded research and of causing long-term to
America's science and technology infrastructure.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Breckler follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much, Dr. Breckler, for your
testimony.
Professor Oman, you may proceed.
STATEMENT OF RALPH OMAN
Mr. Oman. It is a great honor to be here today. Mr.
Chairman, I am not necessarily a stakeholder here. I am
appearing as the former Register of Copyrights of the United
States. I, as always, represent the public interest.
I don't represent any of the parties. But like an old fire
horse, I hear the bells ring and I am off and running to
protect the U.S. copyright system.
I am concerned that the new public access proposals that we
have before us will in fact weaken the commercial market for
scientific, technical and medical journals. If the publishers
of these journals eventually get out of business because they
can't make it pay, we will lose a very valuable tool for
scientific advance. If sales plummet, how can the publishers
continue to publish? I suppose that is the issue that we have
to answer today, whether or not that dire prediction will in
fact come true.
I urge Congress to develop a public access policy that
respects the spirit of the copyright law. The patent and
copyright clause of the Constitution urges Congress ``to
promote the progress of science and the useful arts.''
Summarizing the rest of the provision, ``by giving authors and
publishers an exclusive right in their writings.'' With that
powerful incentive direct from the Constitution to
commercialize their journals, the publishers will reach as
broad an audience as possible for these important publications.
The tension between authors and inventors who benefit from
Government research grants on the one hand and the advocates of
Government ownership of the fruits of that research on the
other has been with us for a long time. I worked on the Bayh-
Dole legislation back in 1980 for my old boss, Senator Mathias
of Maryland. In that debate over patent policy in 1980, Senator
Russell Long of Louisiana argued that any patents developed
with Government research funds should be owned by the
Government. In his inimitable style, he thundered, ``We paid
for it, we own it.''
Senator Bayh and Senator Dole reasoned that the taxpayers
would get a far greater return on investment if we instead
facilitated private sector ownership and commercialization of
these patents, putting the inventions to work for the American
people, creating jobs and helping American competitiveness.
They won that argument and the Small Business and University
Patent Procedure Act has given American innovation a big boost
around the world.
The same policy arguments apply here, Mr. Chairman. For all
the reasons mentioned by Mr. Adler and Dr. Breckler, I do not
think that the Government should get deeply involved in
scholarly publishing. It is a bad for a free enterprise economy
with our tradition of free speech. With normal copyright
protection, the private sector publishers will run the peer-
review process, they will select the articles, they will
aggressively market those publications to corporations, to
libraries, to research institutions. That is the American way.
A broad, free public access policy is an unfortunate precedent
for a country like the United States whose great strength in
foreign markets is intellectual property.
I spent more than 8 years of my life as Register of
Copyrights, fighting to protect American authors and publishers
from foreign pirates. I find it a little strange today that
Congress may now decide to give away some of that intellectual
property free of charge. The pirates must feel vindicated.
There is a huge foreign commercial market for these
publications and a free access policy would cost the United
States millions of dollars that we now get from rich foreign
governments and large foreign corporations. As Senator Mathias,
my old boss, once said, ``talk about Uncle Sap.'' It is like
standing on the coastline and shoveling buckets of greenbacks
into the ocean. We are the only country, as far as I know, to
have such a give it away for nothing policy.
I hope Congress will give the evolving digital marketplace
a chance to come to grips with the new online technologies
without undercutting the incentives that publishers have relied
on for 200 years. We all have compassion for the parent of a
sick child with a rare disease, wanting to have quick and easy
access to articles explaining the latest state-of-the-art
therapies. Let's solve that problem of patient access without
doing damage to the incentives provided by copyright. Let's all
sit down and reason together and figure out how to get the job
done.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Oman follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Professor Oman. And we will now move
to the question period for Members and proceed under the 5-
minute rule. We will begin with Mr. Chaffetz for 5 minutes.
Mr. Chaffetz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it.
One of the things we are looking at is H.R. 5037. And one
of the things that would happen under that piece of legislation
is that it would shorten the time, the embargo time, from 12
months to 6 months. Can you give me a sense of the impact that
you would see of moving from 12 months to 6 months? I will give
you a brief time, but I only have 5 minutes, so I have to go
swiftly. We will start with Mr. Adler.
Mr. Adler. Congressman, the fact of the matter is, we have
argued all along, there is no one size fits all embargo period
that will make sense in journal publishing across the diverse
economic models that exist for publishers. What might work with
respect to a large commercial publisher doesn't necessarily
work with a not-for-profit society publisher or a patient
advocacy organization which publishes a journal not so much in
the same way that a large commercial publisher would looking
for profits, but simply to help generate additional funds to
support some of its other patient advocacy activities.
So the situation here is that if you have a journal that
publishes on a schedule that is quarterly, annual, as opposed
to one that publishes every month, the idea that an embargo of
6 months is going to work adequately for all of them simply
makes no economic sense.
Dr. Breckler. That is correct. In the case of social and
behavioral science, where the shelf life of new articles is
actually quite long, much longer than in other fields of
science, we have suggested on the basis of our data that 12
months is too short, 6 months would probably be devastating. It
would hurt the circulation of the journal articles, and it
would also create a perverse, sort of unfair advantage for
federally funded research.
We pride ourselves at APA journals in publishing a
substantial number of articles that are not funded by the
Federal Government. It is a wonderful thing. It encourages
scholarship and it increases productivity. But if you put
journal articles out there for free, in 6 months it creates a
disincentive for people to purchase the journals, and it drives
down the ability for non-funded investigators to get their work
published and to be seen.
Mr. Chaffetz. Professor Oman.
Mr. Oman. The incentives to publication are weakened
considerably by the 12-month publication requirement. Six
months would effectively destroy the market for those journals,
in my opinion.
Mr. Chaffetz. One of the more compelling arguments for
increased public access are these patient groups. You touched
on it at the end of your testimony, Professor. How do you
address that? What is the answer to that? How do you go back to
these patient groups and say, look, we want to get this
information as swiftly as possible, I don't care what your
financial model is, we have to save lives here?
Maybe Dr. Breckler, we could start with you and then Mr.
Adler.
Dr. Breckler. That is absolutely correct. We have
maintained all along that we would like to sit down with all of
the stakeholders and work out a viable system for everybody,
rather than having the Federal Government mandate one
particular model that happens to be in favor of one
particular----
Mr. Chaffetz. I guess that is the issue. If there is
something we could get everybody to agree on, I would like to
see that. But is there any, is there progress toward that? Is
there any suggestion of that? Is there anything that has come
close to that?
Dr. Breckler. Absolutely. The publishers are already, have
always been at the leading edge of innovation in these kinds of
things and are working with all kinds of groups to make
available the relevant articles, to put them in repositories,
to identify the ones ahead of time that are of greatest
relevance, to do all kinds of things to increase the
accessibility and availability of them.
Mr. Chaffetz. Mr. Adler.
Mr. Adler. That is correct, Congressman. The publishers
have been working with patient advocacy organizations in the
past few years, for example, to create something called Patient
Inform, which is an online service that provides patients and
their caregivers access to some of the most up to date reliable
research about the diagnosis and treatment of specific
diseases, and does so at no cost to them.
Patient Inform also helps to interpret the research and
provides access to additional, more easily comprehended
materials that help explain diagnosis and treatment. At the
same time, many publishers individually have their own programs
for providing access to patients, including walk-in clauses, as
they are called, in their licenses, that enable libraries that
subscribe to their journals to give any member of the public
free electronic onsite access to those journal articles.
Mr. Chaffetz. Thank you all. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mr. Clay. Thank you.
I now recognize the gentlewoman from California, Ms. Chu,
for 5 minutes.
Ms. Chu. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Dr. Oman, in your testimony you wondered if the Government
will commandeer the rights of creative pre-existing materials
that submitted articles may contain. I have three questions
about that.
First, how often do articles contain materials that the
researcher does not already own? And second, do publishers
always clear these rights for the author? And third, why would
publishers not continue to provide this service under an open
access policy?
Mr. Oman. I think they would continue to provide those
services if they were still in business and could make a go of
it commercially. The danger is, of course, that they won't
remain in business and they won't be available to make those
valuable services in polishing and shaping and preparing the
article for public dissemination.
I probably should defer to the publishers on that point.
But it is my view that the system that we have now in terms of
giving copyrights to the authors, to the publishers, is the
best way of encouraging the dissemination of this material and
having those valuable services added on to the raw manuscript
that is produced by the Government-funded researcher.
Dr. Breckler. If I can respond also, I am not in the
publishing end of APA, but I do know enough about how things
work. That is an example of the kind of value added to
scientific publications, to check those things and to give
credit where credit is due. It takes time, it takes staff. It
takes work to do that. It takes money to do that and to do it
well.
It is just another example of the many, many things that
consume resources to bring to the market high quality
scientific publications. That is the kind of thing--APA
wouldn't publish articles without checking those kinds of
things and taking care of those kinds of things, ever. But we
have to take into account the economic reality of what it costs
to do that.
Ms. Chu. Dr. Breckler, in fact, I wanted to ask about APA,
as a psychologist myself, and former member of the American
Psychological Association, I understand that our field is
different from other scientific research disciplines. Can you
explain how the NIH public access model uniquely affects
psychology compared to other disciplines? I know in your
testimony you talk about 15 percent of lifetime use occurs in
the first year. I wonder if that is unique to our discipline or
whether it is similar to other ones.
Dr. Breckler. Sure, a couple of comments. We don't have
ready access to the data from other disciplines, so we can't
really speak for them. But we thought a lot about what those
data mean and why it is that the uptake is spread over such a
long period of time. I think it has something to do with the
nature of the publications and how focused those publications
are. Are they little, incremental advances in very technical
areas, which is common in some fields of science? Or are they
big, sweeping things that take years to develop and have years
of impact and so on.
The social and behavioral sciences probably fall into that
latter category most of the time. They are not small,
incremental, technical answers to small, technical questions.
They tend to be much broader in scope, which would also be true
in other areas of social and behavioral science. So the risk in
the context of NIH, of course, is that NIH funds areas of
science across the board. They fund physics and chemistry and
microbiology, in addition to psychology and sociology and
anthropology and other fields.
So to put them all in the same basket and to assume that
they all have the same models and the same processes and the
same outcomes and so on is a terrible mistake.
Ms. Chu. Mr. Adler, I can definitely understand the
concerns of publishers about the significant investments that
you have made in reviewing, accepting and publishing scientific
journal articles. The numbers are not trivial. However, what I
also know is that without the American taxpayer, who funded the
research, you wouldn't be able to publish such articles. Which
is more important, the publisher's investment or the taxpayers
who have paid more than $60 billion annually in just biomedical
research alone?
Mr. Adler. I don't believe there is an either/or choice
there. The fact of the matter is that to say that publishers
have an advantage because they are able to publish materials
that are about something that the Government has funded, well,
in our country we hope that publishers always, whether they are
newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, book or journal
publishers, will be able to publish about the activities of the
U.S. Government and not feel that they owe a bill to the U.S.
Government for the right to do so.
In this case, we are trying to distinguish very clearly
between the Federal research, the research activity which the
Government does fund, and then the subsequent account of that
research by the researchers, describing and explaining the
research activity which the Government doesn't generally fund.
The publisher funds that.
So we think that there is a natural relationship here. It
is one that has existed for years. Frankly, it wasn't until the
advent of digital network technology allowed for the ability of
this type of material to be so easily accessible and to be so
distributed so quickly around the world that anyone even second
guessed whether or not there was a problem in that
relationship.
Ms. Chu. Thank you. I see my time is up, and I yield back.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, and I thank the gentlewoman from
California.
The gentlewoman from New York, Mrs. Maloney, is recognized
for 5 minutes.
Mrs. Maloney. I thank the chairman for having this hearing.
I think it is an important one, and I think it raises a great
deal of important problems and challenges for the 21st century.
Certainly, patients dealing with an illness or their families
certainly want to know as much as they possibly can about the
illness and to have all the valuable research so that they can
know what is happening.
And at the same time, the Federal Government, the taxpayers
have invested in this research and it is intellectual property
that belongs to the United States. And the copyrights belong to
the Untied States. And the publishers have invested in it. So
it is an American product that if you open it up to everyone,
meaning patients, but also I would say Vietnam, China, the
entire world, that would like to take this information and
immediately use it for their own purposes.
I feel that one of the challenges that we have as a
government for our people and for our taxpayers and for our
future is how we hold on to our intellectual property. That is
the one thing that we continue to produce that is incredibly
valuable. But if everything we produce is immediately made
available to the entire world, so that American workers,
American companies, cannot take advantage of it, then we are
going to be economically disadvantaged to a greater way.
I think that what I would like to ask all of the panelists,
and I will begin with Mr. Adler and then go down to Mr.
Breckler and Professor Oman, is I think that we need to take
another step, not only to protect, to protect the intellectual
property. You are talking about publishers, but it goes broader
than publishers. It is intellectual property.
We should have a way that we can let American citizens read
about information on the latest research on diseases in a way
they can understand it. As one whose father died of
Parkinson's, I was reading everything I could find on
Parkinson's. There is a great deal of research done on
Parkinson's. And reading these scientific documents, for
someone who is not a scientist and not a doctor, it is very
difficult.
So I think you have a two-pronged approach; No. 1, to put
the information in a form that the American public can
understand and that is usable. But at the same time, if we
don't protect our intellectual property, then I fear for the
future of our country, quite frankly.
Another item, we are talking about taxpayer-researched
projects. But we also have a great deal of investment from the
private sector that goes into the latest research that patients
should have access to. But also, I represent a research
industry, I represent major drug companies, major hospitals
that do research. And they have basically told me, if we can't
control our intellectual property, they are not going to
continue investing in this.
So I think that, and we cannot afford, as a country that
now has a huge deficit and a huge debt, we can't afford to keep
spending, yet the strength of our country is research. We need
to continue investing in research, but we have to hold that
research. Otherwise, it is really detrimental to us. We pay for
everything and then within 24 hours, other countries feel like,
``well, why should I ever do any research? I can just steal it
from America.''
I think that we need to take another step, legislatively or
in some way, with the executive orders, to protect this
intellectual property. Otherwise, the private sector is not
going to do it. Publishers aren't going to publish it if they
can't get some profit out of it. We are a profit company.
Unless we want to have Government doing everything, which we
can't afford to do, we face a new, innovative approach, a
problem that we need a new solution to, where we can allow
patients and their families to learn about things.
But we have to protect our intellectual property. And if we
don't, then the private investment is not going to be there,
whether it is a research facility or a publisher or whatever.
So we need to have incentives for the private sector to be
involved. And we also have the challenge of how do we get this
out to the public that are Americans, not to pirates who then
are going to sell it or produce it.
I think that is a huge challenge for the future of research
in this country. And if you look at it, what has made this
country great, I would say it is our research and our
intellectual property. But if we can't hold on to our
intellectual property, then I fear for the economic future,
quite frankly, of American workers.
So I think there is a huge challenge here, and I would like
to start with Mr. Adler and go down the line and see if you
have any answers to it. How can we make information available
that is, and user-friendly to patients and their families, but
at the same time protect the intellectual property so that
pirates don't use it and that the incentive is there for
private investment, private research, private publishing? If
publishers can't get something out of it, they are no longer
going to publish it, then the Government has to publish it.
And quite frankly, what we are being told is ways to save
money. So I just throw that out to our panelists and see if you
have any creative ideas of how to approach this.
Mr. Adler. Well, Congresswoman, on this particular issue,
there is a piece of legislation that has been introduced and is
pending in the House Judiciary Committee by Chairman John
Conyers, as you may know, called the Fair Copyright and
Research Works Act. What that legislation would simply----
Mrs. Maloney. What number is that? Do you have it, the
number of that bill? I can look it up, never mind.
Mr. Adler. I am not sure.
Mrs. Maloney. What does the bill do?
Mr. Adler. What the bill basically would say is that if you
were dealing with research funding for a particular project,
where part of the funding comes from someone other than the
Federal Government, and you are talking about extrinsic
products, things that are derived from that research, or as you
characterize it, are about that research that also have
substantial added value coming from people other than someone
who is contracted with the Government and been funded by the
government as part of the research grant, then the Government
would not be permitted to take the type of position that has
been taken by the NIH under its policy of saying that the
Government agency, because it funded the research, now has the
right to distribute these articles that simply describe and
explain the research, which were not funded by the Government
agency, but can be distributed by the Government agency in
competition with the publisher, based solely on the fact that
the Government funded the research activity.
We think that piece of legislation would not interfere with
research funding activities by the Government. It would only
make the Government make decisions about when it is appropriate
for the Government to decide that the research that it is
funding is intended to derive specific products and results
that only the Government will be able to control. As opposed to
allowing the kind of information which comes out of this
research, most of which, after all, is factual, it is not even
subject to copyright protection, to be utilized by anyone that
wants to be able to either make a living by publishing reports
and accounts of this research or by explaining the research,
whether as a reporter on a science beat for a newspaper or any
other basis of disseminating this information.
We also think that, we have been talking with a U.S. trade
representative and the Commerce Department about the fact that
as they go around the world and engage in bilateral
negotiations with many of our trading partners and try to make
sure that U.S. intellectual property is protected under those
agreements, that they take a look at what the Government is
doing in this instance and see whether in fact this goes
completely against the general tenor of what this
administration has been trying to accomplish through such
efforts.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you.
Mr. Breckler.
Dr. Breckler. Thank you.
The concept of intellectual property is an interesting
thing in the scientific and research community. And generally I
think it is safe to say that scientists and researchers want
their work to be read, they want it to be seen as broadly as
possible, the more the merrier. So they don't want impediments
to the ability for their work to get out there around the
world. I think that is generally true globally.
But what scientists and researchers do want is mainly three
things I think. One is that they want to retain credit for
their intellectual work. They want to be given credit and be
cited for their work, and they don't want it republished under
somebody else's name and so on. So they want that kind of
thing.
The second thing is that they want to control the fate of
their work, the fate of their publications. And the third, and
this is the most important thing for the purpose of this
discussion, is that they rely on a signaling mechanism that
helps to sort out the really good work from the less good work.
I won't call it poor work. They need a signaling mechanism that
says, this is a good article, this is a quality piece of
intellectual property, we should pay attention to it.
And it is precisely that signaling mechanism that the
publishing industry provides through peer review and rigorous
selection of articles for publication, we know that in our high
quality prestige journals, which are the ones that we are
talking about here, if you have an article there, it means
something important.
How many of us have children now, or grandchildren, and we
spend a lot of time trying to teach them how to sort through
what means something and what doesn't mean something on the
Internet? It is hard to tell. There are few signaling
mechanisms. Because it all looks legitimate.
What the scholarly publishers bring to the table is
legitimacy to the process. Anything that destroys that
legitimacy is a loss for science.
Mrs. Maloney. Yes, Professor? Any comments, Professor?
Mr. Oman. After your stirring endorsement of the virtues
and values of intellectual property, I have nothing to add.
Thank you.
Mr. Clay. The gentlewoman's time has expired.
Let me go to Mr. Adler. To recoup costs, have the
publishers considered offering access to titles and charge a
nominal fee for downloading the full article? Much like music
and movie Web sites.
Mr. Adler. Certainly. That is within the purview of every
publisher, whether it is a for-profit or not-for-profit, to
consider in terms of its own business model. And that is
exactly the way the system should work.
What we are talking about here is whether the Government
should be putting its thumb on the scale and essentially
coercing a particular business model because the Government
believes that in doing so, it is enhancing the ability of the
public to learn about research that the Government has funded
as if there was no other way for that to be accomplished.
There is nothing that prevents the funding agencies from
releasing, for example, the annual progress reports that the
funded researchers are required to provide to the funding
agency. There is nothing preventing these agencies from having
staff people who help to translate into common layman's English
what the import of funded research is.
And in an agency like the NIH, for example, which is
perhaps the most well-funded of all science research agencies
in the world, they certainly have ample resources to find other
ways of informing the public about the importance of the
research they funded than by competing directly with journal
publishers, using a version of the journal publisher's own
acquired articles.
Mr. Clay. Now, do you or any of the other panelists have
any data on how a publisher would go out of business as a
result of increased access? Anybody? Any data compiled on that?
Mr. Adler. It is difficult, Mr. Chairman, to get data about
that. Because again, this isn't shutting down publication by
these publishers completely. What it is doing is it is making
it difficult for them to recover some of the investment they
make in certain articles, for which part of that investment
gets apportioned. Because those articles happen to be the ones
that are funded by the Government agency and subject to this
type of policy.
The real question that needs to be asked though is, is
there any substantial deficit in the public's ability to learn
about important research that is funded by the Federal
Government. We in the publishing community don't believe there
is. And if there is a deficit, it is simply due to inaction by
the Government to take any number of courses that it could take
to provide alternative ways for the public to learn about and
understand what kind of scientific research the Government is
funding.
Mr. Clay. And along those same lines of questioning, and I
guess we will ask Professor Oman this one, if the NIH policy
conditions its grants of funding upon the researchers's
agreement to make publicly available the article in 1 year,
where is the copyright issue? Can't the researchers choose
another avenue and not accept the NIH funding?
Mr. Oman. It is really a difficult choice for the
researchers. Obviously, professionally, a grant from the NIH is
a very prestigious achievement. And if the author and the
publisher have to dedicate their publication or the manuscript,
anyway, to the public domain, that in their view probably would
be a small price to pay.
But if ultimately what happened is this prestigious journal
that they were so proud to get published in had to shut down
and go out of business, maybe they would have second thoughts
about abandoning their copyright in exchange for the money.
Mr. Clay. Let me ask, to help me understand better, are the
edits or additional texts written by the publishers after peer
review or the grantees?
Mr. Oman. I should defer to the publishing representatives.
But my understanding is that in fact, it is a continuing
process. The publishers are involved with the author from the
beginning in terms of giving them ideas, suggesting
improvements to the text, consulting with other experts. They
have experts on their own staff. And they do the formal peer
review and then help the author incorporate those suggested
improvements into the manuscript. So it is a continuing
process.
Mr. Clay. So throughout the process, then, they get a
copyrightable attribute?
Mr. Oman. Yes. They make a copyrightable contribution to
the authorship, which is protected by copyright.
Mr. Clay. Thank you.
Is that how you view it, Dr. Breckler?
Dr. Breckler. Yes, that is correct. And if I can clarify,
the concept of grants, which is what most of the external
funding at NIH and NSF and some of the other agencies is about,
is designed to create an incentive and a motivation for the
researchers and the scientists to take ownership of their ideas
and their thoughts and the results of the research.
The intellectual work that goes into publications belongs
to that scientist. It does not belong to the Federal
Government. That is the whole spirit of a grant. And it is one
of the reasons why science in this country thrives, why it is
so successful. These aren't necessarily contracts or works for
hire. The whole scientific research system works this way, and
it spurs creativity and rapid advancements and so on.
So the intellectual property really is vested in the
investigator, not in the granting agency.
Mr. Clay. Have you considered a business model wherein the
publisher charges the author a fee for publishing and what
would be the positives and negatives of such a model?
Mr. Adler. There are many publishers that do utilize that
model. Some of them use it in conjunction with other models.
They still continue to obtain revenue through subscribership at
the cost and charges to the end user of the material.
The fact of the matter is that if you are going to be
basing it, your ability to recover your investments and
continue to make investments on whether or not the authors who
bring you manuscripts are going to be able to pay for the
$4,000 which roughly goes into the processing and handling of
every article that is published by a peer-reviewed journal, you
are going to have to be sure that those authors come to you
with the wherewithal to be able to afford that.
The publishers really don't necessarily want to see authors
being constrained and have to use either part of the money that
they could otherwise use for research or have to go some place
else to find additional money in order to get these articles
published. We believe that having the people who make use of
these articles, particularly when many of those readers are, as
we have suggested to you, corporate institutions that use it
for their own commercial research and their own products and
services, or national governments, or health-related
institutions that use it in furtherance of their own missions,
we don't see why those end users shouldn't ultimately have to
pay for that use.
Mr. Clay. A final question. What timeframe would be an
acceptable embargo time period in order for publishers to
recoup their investment? Anyone on the panel can take a stab at
it.
Mr. Adler. As I said to you before, Mr. Chairman, we
honestly believe that after discussing this, and this
discussion has now gone on for a number of years since the NIH
first proposed its public access policy as a voluntary policy,
that there simply is no single standard that can apply across
the board to all of the different business models and
commercial and not-for-profit publishers in this field. Each
one of them has to determine, with respect to their own
investments, their own publishing schedules, their own need, to
utilize fees and subscription fees that come in from these, to
continue their publishing activities, in order for them to
decide what would be an appropriate embargo period.
The real question to ask is, is that an appropriate task
for the Government, to be determining what an embargo period
should be before this material, which is under copyright,
transferred by the author to the publisher, now gets to be made
freely available around the world by someone else.
Mrs. Maloney. May I ask another question?
Mr. Clay. Yes, let me just see, does Dr. Breckler, do you
have an opinion about embargo time period?
Dr. Breckler. What Mr. Adler said is correct. I think
ultimately, if everybody could agree to come to the table and
discuss this, we could agree on some methods for determining
what the appropriate embargo period would be. This is one of
the reasons APA is looking at its own journal, so that we can
make a determination of what a fair embargo period would be.
Mr. Clay. So each Federal agency could decide that a
different embargo time period?
Dr. Breckler. What I would suggest is that the variables
that will determine that is more than just what the agency is
or what the agency happens to fund. Because it depends a lot
also on the particular discipline of funding. NSF funds things
from physics to social psychology. It depends on the format of
the journal and so on.
Mr. Clay. Professor, any comment?
Mr. Oman. I just wanted to add that perhaps a blanket
approach isn't necessarily the best approach. You might want to
have immediate access for patient access for people who are
private citizens, who are looking for an answer to a question
at 3 a.m., when their child is ill, and a normal copyright
protection for the rest of the world. I think the system can be
nuanced enough with digital technology to achieve that purpose
without destroying the fabric of copyright.
Mr. Clay. Thank you. Thank you all for your responses.
Mrs. Maloney, you are recognized.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you. I think that is an interesting
statement, Professor Oman. But I don't know how you could
protect the copyright. Because someone could just log in
through a friend and have it.
I would like to frame another question. I have strongly
supported a citizen's right to Government information. In fact,
I am very proud of having authored the Electronic Freedom of
Information Act of 1996. It was probably the biggest access to
Federal archives and Federal information and required it
electronically. I probably have gotten more awards as a
visionary legislator on that piece of legislation that allows
the public to have access to this information.
I also authored the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which
was the largest unveiling of CIA documents probably in history.
But I am concerned that in looking at the issue of public
access to federally funded research, we have to be careful to
protect the intellectual property, particularly since we live
in such a competitive world. At one time, we were competing
with another State or another business. Now we are competing
with China, India, Vietnam and who knows, another emerging
country that may emerge soon.
So we are competing with jobs and in every way. I think
that we as a Government need to protect the taxpayer dollars in
this research. And a scientific publisher likewise, whether it
is for-profit or non-profit, or even a Government publisher,
has the right to protect their work product. We need to be
careful as we look at this issue. I think it is a very
complicated one. And I think we need even more of an answer
than Mr. Conyers has put forward, as explained to me by Mr.
Adler.
I would say that some proponents of public access to
federally funded research call for putting a final manuscript
online immediately. Some say 6 months, some say after it is
accepted for publication. But this article, in many ways, goes
far beyond federally funded. As one who just recently wrote a
book, it is not that easy. You present a manuscript, your
editors look at it, everybody comments in the world on it, they
refine it, they take time to look at this.
So what finally is printed is not, at least in the case of
my book, there were a lot of hands going into it and suggesting
it could be done in a clearer way, a better way, and why didn't
you add this and add that. I would say that is the way all
publishing is, whether scientific or a book or whatever. You
have publishers, you have researchers, you have fact checkers.
They are not going to print anything, they have to fact check
it and make sure it is accurate. They have to send it out and
have all these other scientists say, you are right or you are
wrong, or it is crazy or it is innovative, or it needs more
research.
So the point I am making, that it is a product that has
been worked on. And we don't want to take that aspect out of
the economic chain. If you take that out, you are not going to
get the good peer-reviewed, fact-checked article. I mean, you
and I can go on the Internet tomorrow and publish whatever we
want. Here is my scientific study on whatever, on what I think
is the cure for cancer. I could go home tonight, write my paper
and print it on the Internet tomorrow. No one would read it, I
am sure.
But the point I am trying to make is that anyone can
publish anything now, particularly. But when it comes out of a
peer-reviewed publication, it is scientific. Other scientists
have spent time, and they probably pay them, I don't know, to
read it and say, ``this is accurate,'' ``this is wrong,'' ``I
think it is valuable,'' ``I think it is not valuable.'' So in
other words, it is an expensive process that gives value added
to scientific research in our country.
The point I am trying to make is that I don't think we want
to take that out of our country. Because if you take that out
and don't allow someone to make a profit, they are not going to
do it. I just came from a financial services meeting, and one
of my bills, they always want everything to be free. I always
argue that people have to make a profit or cover their
expenses, or they are not going to do it. Whether it is your
ATM fees, one of my bills was just letting consumers know there
is an ATM fee, and then you decide whether it is worth your
time to pay a dollar to get your money at the spot.
But the point is, publishers aren't going to do peer-
reviewed research, publish it in the first place, unless they
are entitled to have some type of profit or at least pay their
expenses. They have to pay people to look at these things. They
have to pay fact checkers. When a publisher prints something,
they have fact checked everything in it and paid someone to do
it. Maybe for months, who knows. Depends how complicated it is.
So I think there are many levels that we don't want to
disrupt scientific research in our country. It is probably the
most valuable commodity that we have. Not only do we want it
published and peer-reviewed, but in my opinion, I think we have
to be careful about protecting the intellectual property in
order to be competitive in the world financial markets. If
everything that we discover we are going to immediately give to
every other country, then they are not going to be investing in
research. They will say, ``let America invest billions in
research,'' and they will be publishing it the next day that
something is peer-reviewed and accurate, and then we can grab
it and produce it quickly and undercut them and they won't make
any money off their research.
If that starts happening, the private sector certainly is
not going to invest in research. And you will have Members of
Congress saying, ``why are we bothering with this research that
is immediately being sent to another country?''
So I think that we really have a huge problem ahead of us
on how we protect our copyright and protect our intellectual
property for us to be able to compete and win economically.
That is how serious I think it is.
Then also, we need to protect the publishers. Otherwise,
they are not going to be doing peer reviews. They are not going
to be investing in fact checkers. Why should they? They won't
make any profit.
So I think we have a challenge where we don't want to kill,
you get the point. Now, does anybody have any answers? I
certainly don't. But I do know that we have a challenge in
front of us. And I think it is a serious one, if we want to
compete and win in the world economy and hold on to our
scientific research.
And let me add something else. You say that all of these
scientists want their product to be read and they want their
name on it. Well, no one is going to read their product unless
it is published and fact-checked and peer reviewed. That takes
money. All of us can write a thesis tonight and throw it on the
Internet. Doesn't mean anyone is going to read it. But if it
comes out of the so and so review scientific panel of NIH or
whatever, then everybody is going to look at it and say, hey,
this is important.
I am very interested in women's health, and then I will be
quiet on this. I subscribe to certain publishers on women's
health, because that is one of the fields that I invest my time
in. Certain ones, people mail me, I wake up every morning,
there are documents on my front door on women's health.
But the ones I really pay attention to are the ones that
are published by respected publishers and scientific
communities that I know have been fact-checked, peer-reviewed,
tested, tested on rats, tested on people, and that it is really
scientifically pure. But that takes money to do it. And I don't
think we want to take that out of our system. I think we are
going to have a big problem on anybody doing it.
And then also, I am very concerned about our
competitiveness in the world economy. We have not done a good
job in protecting, we can't even protect a song much less a
cure for cancer or other important scientific research. It is a
big issue, Mr. Chairman. You walked into a big issue.
Mr. Clay. It is.
Mrs. Maloney. You always do. He always does.
Mr. Clay. I appreciate your involvement in this hearing.
The gentlewoman's time has expired, and this panel is
excused.
We will now ask for the second panel to come up and take
your seats. I will now introduce our second panel. On this
panel we will hear from Dr. Richard Roberts. Dr. Roberts is the
chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs. Dr. Roberts
was formally educated in England. His post-doctoral research
was completed at Harvard. He is the author of numerous articles
and holds several patents. Dr. Roberts is also the 1993
recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in physiology and medicine
for the discovery of split genes. Welcome.
Next, we have Ms. Sharon Terry. Ms. Terry is the president
and CEO of Genetic Alliance, a network promoting openness and
centered on the health of individuals, families and
communities. Ms. Terry, a former college chaplain, and her
husband founded and built an organization that enables ethical
research and policies, and provides support and information to
Members and the public. In 2009, she received a Research
America distinguished organization advocacy award. Ms. Terry
also has an honorary doctorate from Iona College. Welcome to
the committee, Ms. Terry.
Next we have Mr. Elliott Maxwell. Mr. Maxwell is a graduate
of Brown University and received his law degree from Yale. He
is a former Department of Commerce official, specializing in
international technology policy, technology administration as
well as digital economy. He served as a senior fellow at the
Aspen Institute. He currently advises on the intersection of
business, technology and public policy and electronic commerce
and telecommunications. Welcome to you.
Next we have Professor Sophia Colamarino, a graduate of
Stanford and the University of California San Francisco. After
16 years of laboratory research experience, Sophia joined Cure
Autism Now in November 2004, as science director. After
receiving her Ph.D., Professor Colamarino conducted research on
genetic disorders in Milan, Italy. Sophia's extensive research
has been included in many publications, in addition to her work
in Autism Speaks. She is also a consulting associate and
professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences at Stanford University. Welcome to you.
Next we will hear from Dr. David Shulenburger. Dr.
Shulenburger is a graduate of the University of Illinois,
receiving a master's degree and a Ph.D. He is the author of
numerous articles and publications. Dr. Shulenburger was
recently the executive vice chancellor and provost at the
University of Kansas. He is currently the vice president of
Academic Affairs at the Association of Public and Land Grant
Universities. Welcome.
Our final witness on this panel will be Ms. Catherine
Nancarrow. Ms. Nancarrow came to the Public Library of Science
Community Journals in January 2005 to coordinate the editorial
production Web and marketing efforts of the Community Journals.
She is experienced as both a managing editor and development
editor on peer-reviewed medical journals. Welcome to you also.
It is the policy of this committee that we swear in all
witnesses before the testify. Would you all please stand and
raise your right hands?
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Clay. Thank you. You may be seated. Let the record
reflect that the witnesses answered in the affirmative.
Each of you, of course, will have 5 minutes to make an
opening statement. We have your complete written testimony as
part of the hearing record. Please observe the lights in front
of you.
Dr. Roberts, you may begin.
STATEMENTS OF RICHARD ROBERTS, PH.D., F.R.S., CHIEF SCIENTIFIC
OFFICER, NEW ENGLAND BIOLABS; SHARON F. TERRY, PRESIDENT AND
CEO, GENETIC ALLIANCE; ELLIOT MAXWELL, DIRECTOR, DIGITAL
CONNECTIONS COUNCIL, COMMITTEE FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT; SOPHIA
COLAMARINO, VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH, AUTISM SPEAKS; DAVID
SHULENBURGER, VICE PRESIDENT FOR ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, ASSOCIATION
OF PUBLIC AND LAND GRANT UNIVERSITIES; AND CATHERINE NANCARROW,
MANAGING EDITOR, PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE COMMUNITY JOURNALS
STATEMENT OF RICHARD ROBERTS
Mr. Roberts. I thank you, Chairman Clay.
My name is Sir Richard Roberts. I am chief scientific
officer at New England Biolabs, a small company in Ipswich, MA
that makes reagents for biological research.
I am also the 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or
Medicine.
Let me thank you for inviting me to testify here on the
important subject of public access to the results of publicly
funded research. Because scientific research critically depends
on the knowledge of the scientific literature and building on
the work of others, access to this literature is the key to
progress.
In my view, the open access movement is one of the single
most important initiatives currently underway within the
scientific community.
In addition to my role as chief scientific officer, which
involves producing the scientific vision for the future
business of New England Biolabs, I am also an active, working
scientist, running both an experimental laboratory and a
computer-based bioinformatics lab. In my various roles, I rely
completely on digital access to a broad swath of the scientific
literature, so that I am aware of all the major advances in
biology as well as the latest work in my own field.
I read articles in a large number of different journals,
and am acutely aware of the difficulties accessing articles
that are not available via open access. Because of the ever-
increasing cost of subscriptions, our company, like most small
biotech companies, cannot afford subscriptions to all of the
journals we might read.
As a result, I often find myself paying the $30 or more
that is often necessary to read an article that is in a journal
to which I do not subscribe. Since a use of the scientific
literature depends upon being able to quickly move from one
article to another to find the relevant science, it is
frustrating and inefficient when each step requires the time to
make another payment. Even more disconcerting is when the
article that one paid to read turns out to be totally
irrelevant to the search in hand.
Of course, the biggest problem is that without
comprehensive access to the literature, it is impossible to
know where the cutting edge of science lies. It is at this
cutting edge that science must work if we are to be productive.
This lack of access has a very deleterious impact on the small
startup biotech companies and others for whom cutting edge
science is their bread and butter.
Promoting public access to publicly funded research results
will have a huge impact in improving the health of small U.S.
companies that depend on science and will also send a strong
message that the routine practice of denying access to those
who are unable to afford the subscription costs is actually
impeding science.
Also, as we all know, it is these small entrepreneurial
companies that create the new jobs in the United States, jobs
that are very badly needed at present.
While major universities enjoy a great deal of access to
the scientific literature, no institution can afford to
subscribe to all of the journals that they might want to
provide to their constituents. This is even more of a problem
in many other sectors of society. Many of the smaller colleges,
including most of the liberal arts colleges, that feed their
graduates into the major research universities, have extremely
limited access to the scientific literature. Ensuring public
access to at least that subset of research results produced
using public funds is something we can do right now, and would
be a useful and exemplary step toward filling this gap.
Even more importantly, as was brought home to me when I
attended the recent 2010 Intel Science Fair in San Jose is that
high school students, such as those preparing science fair
projects, increasingly require access to the scientific
literature if their projects are to include the innovation that
makes them the winners. While most schools now have good access
to computers, it is only when articles are available through
open access that they also have access to the full range of the
scientific literature. Most high schools can only dream of
affording access to pricy scientific journals.
We must remember that these young people going through our
schools are the next generation of scientists that will enable
our country to remain competitive into the foreseeable future.
Providing public access to the results of publicly funded
research would have an immediate and positive impact on the
quality of information available to these students.
Too often we forget that research is carried out in many
places other than the well-known research universities. A
strong policy demanding open access to the results of
Government-funded research can help small companies become
competitive, can stimulate job opportunities within those
companies, and can ensure that our students, the scientists of
the future, can find out where the cutting edge of research
really lies.
Thank you. I welcome any questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Roberts follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much, Dr. Roberts.
Ms. Terry, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF SHARON F. TERRY
Ms. Terry. Chairman Clay, thank you for the opportunity to
testify at this hearing.
I am president and CEO of Genetic Alliance, which works to
transform health through genetics. Our network includes more
than 1,200 patient advocacy organizations and thousands of
partnerships with universities, companies, government agencies
and policy organizations. The network is an open space for
thousands of shared resources, hundreds of creative tools and
dozens of dynamic programs.
I am also the mom of two children diagnosed with
pseudoxanthoma elasticum in 1994. My husband, who is a trade
school graduate, and I, a college chaplain, stole access to
medical libraries, hacked into Internet Grateful Med, and
ultimately read 400 articles on this disease. As a result of
what we learned, we founded PXE International, created a
biobank, cloned the gene, created a diagnostic test and
initiated clinical trials. We are the ordinary American public
and our access to these articles has been critical.
We are not odd, there are many like us, managing disease
research and managing personalized care. I have heard there are
hundreds of thousands of unique users of PubMed Central a day.
These are not only scientists. Imagine if we had public access
to all scientific articles.
We applaud the Congress for the current NIH policy.
Translating basic science into diagnostics and therapies is an
urgent need. All information on the raw materials of making
sense of a disease and mitigating its effects should be
immediately available.
Some say that only academicians and scientists at major
institutions need access to these journal articles. Not so. We
live in an information age that can and will thrust us into a
new age of innovation and health and healing. This requires
multidisciplinary articles in the hands of patients, parents,
students, engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists in land grant
colleges and historically Black colleges. It is unconscionable
that scientific information is not immediately available to
everyone.
While publishers argue that they create value around the
raw information, we would argue that scientists funded with
Federal tax dollars and so stewards of the public trust infuse
these articles with value. There is no doubt that the
publishers add value and that the value proposition around this
body of knowledge should be paid for. But not the analysis of
research results themselves. It is the duty of the Federal
Government to facilitate sunshine on this data and to bring
these articles into the public comments as quickly as possible.
We have seen business paradigms for all kinds of industries
evolve as information aggregation changes. It is time for the
biomedical publishing industry to evolve as well. Today we are
among the millions facing an uphill battle, including the
future of disease and disability for our children. Thousands of
diseases affect millions of Americans. I have watched thousands
of people in our community die in these years, and the time for
waiting is over.
Let's do it, let's not spend any more of our precious time
debating this, commenting on this. We live on the promise and
inestimable value of publicly funded science. Obstacles to
translating basic science into practice abound. But gated
access is an artificial one. Remove barriers to information
immediately. Grant us public access to publicly funded research
without delay. We have a great deal of work to do, and we need
the tools now.
I would be happy to take any questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Terry follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much, Ms. Terry, for your testimony.
Mr. Maxwell, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF ELLIOT MAXWELL
Mr. Maxwell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am honored to have
this opportunity to testify before the subcommittee.
My name is Elliot Maxwell. I am here representing the
Committee for Economic Development, a non-profit, non-partisan
business-led public policy organization.
For nearly 70 years, CED has provided sound policy research
on major economic and social issues facing the Nation. The
membership of CED is made up of some 200 senior corporate
executives from a wide range of industry sectors, as well as
leaders from U.S. universities.
To address cutting edge technology issues, particularly
those arising from the emergence of the Internet, CED
established its Digital Connections Council, comprised of
information technology experts from CED companies. Since 2004,
I have directed the DCC, which has published a series of
reports focusing on the impact of the Internet and on
increasing digitization of information.
The members of the DCC, coming from high technology
organizations, all rely incredibly on intellectual property
protections as their parent organizations. But they have come
to realize that the rise of the Internet and the digitization
of information has led to an explosion of greater openness, and
that greater openness is critical for increasing innovation.
Economic development is part of the name of the Committee
for Economic Development, and that is where its focus is. These
are businesses that are interested in economic activity, in
economic growth and the innovation that is necessary to
accomplish it. They came to the conclusion that this bill and
policies that increase openness are absolutely crucial for
economic growth and to restrict access to information, to
continue policies that would limit access by businesses, by
individuals, by academic institutions, more broadly would be
harmful to the economic growth of the United States, would
prevent the kind of growth we need at this very moment.
The bill addresses three important points. One is to
increase access to the research. We have heard from two people,
one representing a small business, one representing individuals
who are concerned about the health of their children or
relatives. They don't have access. In some cases people can't
afford it, in some cases they are not able to get to the
information to where, or to institutions where they would have
access to it. Businesses can't afford all the kind of
information that they would like to have.
It is axiomatic that the more people who have access to
information, the more people who can buildupon it. And the real
value of information is in its use. It is not in the
information itself; it is in people using it.
The second important part is, you want to increase the
impact of the research that you fund. You want to get a higher
return on the investment, an enormous investment that is made
by the U.S. Government. And the way to do that is to give it
more, make it more available to people who are creative and who
want to use this information. We can't know before hand how
they are going to use it.
So it is very important to try to get this out as broadly
as possible. To be frank, it is not necessarily in the interest
of publishers to get it out more broadly, it is in the interest
of publishers to maximize their return. And that is perfectly
sensible.
It is in the interest of the U.S. Government to get its
funded research out to as many people as possible to broaden
its impact. Greater openness, greater accessibility increases
the speed of discovery. It broadens discovery because it makes
information available to people who might not otherwise know
about it, or even be working in the same field. It reduces
redundant research. It keeps people from going over blind
alleys they wouldn't know about because they didn't have access
to it.
And most importantly, it allows more people to innovate
upon that research. Think about the Weather Service. I remember
2 years ago, 3 years ago, people were saying, ``why don't we
have the Weather Service's information?'' We can get it from
the Weather Channel. But the Weather Channel couldn't exist
without the availability of U.S. Government information. It is
allowing people to have access to information, to innovate upon
it, that creates those opportunities that allows people to
build businesses, to create jobs, to innovate. That is what we
need to do now.
So we are speaking for businesses who want innovation, who
want economic growth and know that the way to do that, the
social return on the investment of research is enhanced by
making it more broadly available. It is not enhanced by
restricting it.
It helps people who worry about the health of their
children, it helps small businesses. It helps anybody who is
creative in making available this information. And because it
is a U.S. Government investment, we need to think about the
best way of increasing that return on investment.
It is consistent with intellectual property laws, the idea
that journal articles exist separately from the research in
some disconnected fashion seems implausible. They wouldn't
exist without this research. We need to do everything we can to
make the return higher, to spur innovation and to get more
economic growth.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Maxwell follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much, Mr. Maxwell.
Professor Colamarino, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF SOPHIA COLAMARINO
Ms. Colamarino. Thank you, Chairman Clay. I am speaking on
behalf of Autism Speaks, the Nation's largest autism science
and advocacy organization. Importantly, I ask that my full
statement be included in the hearing record.
I am here today as a scientist with a Ph.D. in neuroscience
who serves as the vice president of research for Autism Speaks.
We invest over $20 million in annual funding for research into
the causes, prevention and treatments for autism.
I am also speaking to you today as the architect of the
first public access policy for a U.S.-based non-profit advocacy
organization.
Today I would like to underscore the importance of open
access from three perspectives: that of the families affected
by a disorder; that of an active scientist who needs access to
effectively do her job; and that of a funder that needs access
to achieve our mission and provide accountability while doing
so.
So first, the families. My main motivation for being here
today is the desire to improve the lives of individuals with
autism. Autism impacts nearly 1 in 100 children in the United
States. There are currently no effective treatments that
address the core symptoms. For decades, parents and care
providers have cobbled together intervention approaches as they
best see fit.
Access to the latest findings would empower them to be more
educated advocates by allowing them to read first-hand the
research progress. However, they have to struggle to find the
most credible information necessary to make informed decisions
because of what currently amounts to an arbitrary barrier to
accessing published research literature. Sadly, in 2010, where
essentially anything said by anyone can be accessible within a
matter of moments, families are inundated with information and
have access to all but the most scientifically rigorous data.
And it is time for that to change.
Second, my job as a scientist. I am tasked on providing
counsel and investing millions in research funding. However,
when I left academia to direct research in the context of an
advocacy organization, I had no idea what a major hurdle I
would find. On a Friday in 2004, I left my research position at
the Saulk Institute, where I had full access to scientific
literature. The following Monday, I started my new position as
science director of an international research organization and
I had none.
To this day, Autism Speaks grantees and fellow scientists
are shocked to find out that our organization does not have
free access to these articles. This is not unique to us. It is
not financially possible for non-profit funders of health
research and training to subscribe to the full range of science
journals needed to do their work.
I also want to emphasize, this barrier is not exclusive to
science duties. My colleagues in our Government relations
divisions cannot access the primary research literature
required to substantiate their policy recommendations.
In sum, there is an entire segment of scientists and health
advocates blocked from effectively doing their jobs without
this access.
Third, our mission. The mission of Autism Speaks is to
improve the future for all who struggle with autism. We are
dedicated to funding global biomedical research and translating
discoveries into tangible impacts. I cannot stress how
important it is for research findings to be in the public
domain. Funding organizations such as ours can support as much
research as they wish. But unless the knowledge is utilized by
others, it remains useless.
Unfortunately, just as there are scientists currently
denied access based on our employment situations, there are
also academic researchers in less developed countries who
cannot afford journal access, and even lay people who want to
devote their minds to autism but cannot gain access to the
literature to study it. It is critical to our mission that
research papers resulting from public funding be readily
available to anyone with an interest in autism research.
We must also be accountable in pursuit of this mission. Our
donors are typically the families of the very individuals we
are aiming to help, many of whom are already financially
struggling due to the heavy burden of autism care. It is
exceedingly important for them to see the outcome of their
investment and their impact on reducing disease burden.
I find it frustratingly difficult to explain to a donor who
provided me with the money in the first place to pay for the
research that they have to pay once again to see the outcome of
that research.
Now, as I said at the start, Autism Speaks is perhaps
uniquely qualified to call for expanded access to the results
of publicly funded research, because in 2008, we implemented
our own public access policy. We modeled this policy on the
highly successful policy of the NIH. Several other non-profit
organizations have since expressed interest in following ours.
This is perhaps the best proof that what I have spoken of today
is not about the needs of autism per se, but about the
fundamental way to change the way stakeholders are finally
included in this discovery process.
In summary, open access to publicly funded research will
lead to more informed advocacy and further research advances.
It has enormous benefits for families that need information
that directly affects their lives, and it will greatly enhance
the ability of scientists like me who quite simply require
access to invest our scarce research dollars. It will also help
the myriad other organizations such as Autism Speaks achieve
their mission; namely, benefiting the public by accelerating
research toward breakthrough discoveries, treatments and
eventually cures.
Thank you for providing me with this opportunity to speak,
and I am happy to take any questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Colamarino follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much, Professor.
Dr. Shulenburger.
STATEMENT OF DAVID E. SHULENBURGER
Dr. Shulenburger. Thank you, Chairman Clay, for the
opportunity to speak today about public access. It is an
important topic for higher education for the future of the
country.
The Association of Public and Land Grant Universities
[APLU], supports Federal legislation ensuring public access to
scholarly articles growing out of federally funded research.
APLU is an association of public research universities
including all flagship and all land grant universities in every
State. Our 219 members enroll more than 4.7 million students,
award 60 percent of the U.S. doctoral degrees, and conduct
nearly two-thirds of all federally funded academic research.
For the last 4 years, I have been the academic affairs
officer of APLU. Before joining the organization, I spent 13
years as provost at the University of Kansas, and a total of 34
years on its faculty. I am also an economist.
My interest in access to scholarly writing was intensified
both by my duties as provost and my discipline as an economist.
For over two decades, journal prices increased at a nearly 10
percent annual rate, while KU's budget barely kept up with
inflation. Why did journal prices increase at a rate that made
them less available to higher education? That question has
since been my major research focus.
The problem we address is that faculty from time to time
experience delays in accessing articles published in scholarly
journals or cannot gain access at all. These road blocks harm
their productivity. The public access policy is primarily aimed
at easing these road blocks.
But access to scholarly literature is also important to the
quality of education. Clearly, superior graduate education is
based on the use of this literature. But this research also
informs good undergraduate instruction. Unfortunately, students
at non-research institutions and their faculty don't have broad
access to this research literature. Perhaps those with least
access are at the community colleges, where half our country's
students are now enrolled. A Federal public access policy would
have positive impacts on all post-secondary education.
As you have heard, many businesses, especially high-tech
startups, need access to research findings. Better access
improves their chances of remaining competitive. The need of
individuals to access the scholarly literature comes from many
directions. When a child receives a deadly diagnosis, parents
have difficulties understanding why they can't have ready
access to the research that has been funded with their public
dollars.
APLU supports NIH's public access model. It works. So we
support its spread to other funding agencies. The Federal
Research Public Access Act follows NIH's proven model, and APLU
endorses its passage, with some caveats.
Central deposits, such as NIH has, may not be necessary. An
article conceivably could be placed in a faculty member's own
university repository and be included virtually in the funding
agency's public access repository. To the extent possible, we
would hope deposit requirements and procedures should be
uniform across funding agencies, because that would reduce the
cost of compliance considerably.
The NIH has a flexible, zero to 12 month embargo period,
not as you have heard, a one size fits all, but it is a
flexible period that exists now, and it depends upon the
preferences of the journal publication. We believe that is
acceptable for public access. Shorter would be better, but 12
months is acceptable.
A choice has to be made between deposit of the final
manuscript version of the article, or the article in the form
in which it appears in the journal. We favor the latter, so
long as full text, word by word search can be made. Some
suggest that access to the final grant report would provide
adequate access to research findings. We do not accept this
contention. Most grant reports are narrowly focused. Journal
articles generally provide context for the results reported,
relate those results to the wider literature, and are more
easily located through public finding aids.
Public access with characteristics I have enumerated, would
be compatible with the continuation of subscription-based
scholarly journals. The evidence is that public access has
little impact on subscription revenue and is thus fully
consistent with ensuring that the refereeing of the literature
continues. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Shulenburger follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Clay. From a Missouri Tiger to a Kansas Jayhawk, thank
you, too. [Laughter.]
Ms. Nancarrow, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF CATHERINE NANCARROW
Ms. Nancarrow. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a privilege
to testify today before the subcommittee about the importance
of public access to the results of federally funded research.
I am speaking on behalf of the Public Library of Science
[PLoS]. PLoS is a non-profit publisher of peer-reviewed
journals. But what makes PLoS different from the bulk of
journal publishers is that every article we publish is open
access. Each is freely and publicly available online as soon as
it is published.
My name is Catherine Nancarrow, and I am the managing
editor of PLoS's community journal program. I have over 25
years of experience in publishing, and I have managed a number
of peer-reviewed medical and bioscience journals. In 2004, I
was delighted to join PLoS, because of its mission to drive a
transition toward comprehensive public access to all research
articles.
Policies promoting public access have been embraced by many
organizations beyond PLoS. Yet concerns have been expressed
that they will be detrimental to the scholarly publishing
enterprise.
My goal today is to make three key points. PLoS has shown
that open access journals can be published according to the
highest standards. We have shown that open access publishing is
economically sustainable. And finally, the real benefit of
immediate public access is that it transforms the research
literature into a profoundly powerful resource for research and
education.
To address the point about quality, PLoS has consistently
adhered to the highest standards of editorial integrity and
publishing ethics. We knew that we would only develop broader
confidence in open access publishing if the quality of the
articles that we publish is of the highest standard.
Seven years from when we launched PLoS Biology, our
journals are highly regarded as trusted sources of research
information and are desirable venues for researchers to publish
their best work. Our journals have international editorial
boards comprised of leading researchers across a range of
disciplines, are featured in leading blogs and media outlets
and receive substantial numbers of submissions each month and
continue to grow.
In addition, many of our journal articles are highly cited,
another indication of their significance to the research
community.
To address the point of financial viability, let me briefly
explain our business model. Whereas most publishers charge a
fee to access their content, PLoS charges a fee to publish in
its journals. In this way, the cost of publishing can be
recovered before publication and the content can therefore be
made freely and publicly accessible as soon as it is published.
Using this model, PLoS has progressed steadily toward
sustainability and posted its first two profitable quarters in
Q1 and Q2 of 2010. In doing so, we will be on target to make a
modest profit.
This achievement represents a landmark for PLoS, but also
for open access publishing as a whole. As well as being
economically sustainable as an organization, our individual
community journals are each fully self-sufficient. They
represent models for how typical academic journals can maintain
high standards of publishing and achieve immediate public
access supported by publication fees.
This is relevant to all publishers considering a move to
open access, whether commercial, not-for-profit, university
presses or scientific societies. PLoS is not alone in
demonstrating the economic success of open access publishing,
however. Two large commercial publishers, BioMed Central and
Hindawi Publishing, have also shown that open access
publishing, based on the publication fee model, is sustainable
in environments where public policies have been put in place by
national funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Research
Councils UK. A prominent example is Springer, who bought BioMed
Central in 2008 and continues to expand their open access
publishing operation.
Beyond publishers, there are demonstrable and critical
commitments to open access from the other key stakeholders in
publishing: funders, institutions, libraries, policymakers, and
the research community. Just last week, UNESCO announced
``scientific information is both a researcher's greatest output
and technological innovation's most important resource. UNESCO
promotes open access.''
I will end by highlighting two examples of how researchers
have made the most of public and open access to PLoS articles.
Professor David Shotton from Oxford University reworked an
article about a tropical disease caused by Leptospira
infection. He linked various terms in the article to other
sources of information and data, enhanced the figure to provide
moveable interactive maps and enriched tables with downloadable
data. A series of editorials in PLoS Computational Biology has
been translated into Chinese, repurposed into a series of video
presentations and developed into a graduate level course
curriculum.
These are just first steps, but they show how public access
promotes creative re-use of content and transforms the
literature into a more powerful resource for research and
teaching. With the elimination of all barriers to access, our
use of the literature is only limited by our imagination.
Thank you, and I am happy to take any questions you might
have.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Nancarrow follows:]
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Mr. Clay. Thank you, Ms. Nancarrow. I thank the entire
panel for their testimony.
Let me ask a panel-wide question. We can start with Dr.
Roberts. Are you concerned that open access would affect the
peer review process?
Mr. Roberts. Not at all. In fact, it is already clear that
it has no effect on the peer review process. For many years, I
was chief editor of Nucleic Acids Research, the first journal
to go from being subscription based to being open access. We
saw absolutely no difference between the willingness of
reviewers to come and review for us when we were a subscription
based journal or when we were an open access journal.
I for instance review frequently for the PLoS journals at
no charge. Contrary to what you may have heard earlier,
reviewers don't get paid. Reviewers do it for free. I have a
paper in my briefcase at the moment from PLoS Genetics that I
am reviewing.
It is unrelated, peer review is unrelated to whether you
are looking at subscription journals or whether they are open
access journals. We do peer review as scientists because we
feel this is a very important part of our service to science.
Mr. Clay. Wow. Thank you for that response.
Ms. Terry.
Ms. Terry. I agree completely with that. I too am a
reviewer, for free, as well. I think that what we are looking
for is an ecosystem that allows a greater enhancement of
publishing overall. You have heard some of those things here
today. In addition to the immediate peer reviewers of articles,
articles that are widely disseminated, are able to be
integrated into technologies, into diagnostics, etc., and
transformed more quickly.
I think the community itself, the scientists, want to do
excellent work and want to hear from their peers, not just in a
formal process and in a somewhat antiquated publishing system,
but in a broader one that takes into account innovation and the
technologies that are making the Internet really successful in
disseminating all these augmented and annotated resources.
Mr. Clay. Thank you.
Mr. Maxwell, how does open access affect us?
Mr. Maxwell. I think as we have already heard, that there
are peer review processes in open access journals as well as in
proprietary journals. I want to make one slightly different
point, and that is that the greater the public access to the
material, the more likely it is that people will find problems
with it or make suggestions about it. And it is not a two or
three people reading of a particular article. When it gets out
and available, more people can see it and more people can
discover things that they can buildupon, or things that they
can criticize.
Mr. Clay. So that means the information could actually be
enhanced?
Mr. Maxwell. Absolutely.
Mr. Clay. I see.
Mr. Maxwell. And sometimes I think that is an underrated
part of what happens in the Internet. Now, that is not to deny
that there is a lot of garbage out there. We know that. But as
people have said repeatedly, sunshine is the best disinfectant.
It is better to have people able to have access and comment
than to withhold.
Mr. Clay. Professor Colamarino, any comment?
Ms. Colamarino. Thank you. I think that our publishers here
can speak to this a little bit better, but as far as I am
concerned, it shouldn't have an impact. In fact, as Dr. Roberts
already mentioned, and it wasn't brought up, I don't believe,
on the earlier panels, reviewers are not actually paid. It is a
public service work that they do.
I also want to echo what Mr. Maxwell said, which is what I
was going to say, which is that science is self-correcting. So
in fact, there is further review once the article gets out
there. That review is done by the broader community. That is
how science gets used. It is very iterative. So it actually is
furthered with open access.
Mr. Clay. Thank you.
Dr. Shulenburger.
Dr. Shulenburger. I completely agree. We have had
considerable experience with public access, as well as open
access. We don't see journals declining in numbers. In fact,
the journals are a very healthy ecosystem. They are increasing
in numbers very rapidly now. Thus I am confident that
subscription-based journals will continue. That has been the
experience under NIH, and I think we will see, as NIH's
experience gets longer, that will be the case.
But as healthy as this ecosystem is, and the fact that it
depends upon free labor for review and only pays to organize
those reviews, I am confident we will develop models that will
continue it into the future. We must.
Mr. Clay. Thank you.
Ms. Nancarrow, will open access have a negative impact on
peer review?
Ms. Nancarrow. Absolutely not. I can say that both as an
editor of having been in subscription based journals prior to
coming to PLoS. But I have to say that one of the hallmarks of
peer review, or the journals' responsibility, is qualitative
and quantitative and a peer review of excellence. And I think
PLoS has shown that all of our journals provide, in fact, many
of our authors would say it is extremely rigorous peer review.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the scientists who do
dedicate their time to it and ensure the heathy assessment of
the science that we publish.
Mr. Clay. Thank you so much.
I guess I can direct this to the panel, or maybe Dr.
Shulenburger could respond. Could you give your opinion as to
how you believe open access would affect students and those
researchers working on projects?
Dr. Shulenburger. In order to do the best science, in order
not to repeat yourself, you have to know what has been done
before. And you only know that if the material is available, is
published, and you can get to it as a researchers. Much of our
training of doctoral students is done as they do research.
Having that material fully available to them makes a
difference.
But I want to repeat what I said earlier. We think of this
as distant material. I have had a great many of my
undergraduates who went to the literature and used it. Those
community college students would use it, their faculty would
use it. Maybe not daily, but the best of them have potentials
to win Nobel prizes some day. We just simply need to put before
them material that will keep them challenged and make the most
of their talents.
Mr. Clay. Anyone else on how to impact students? Dr.
Roberts.
Mr. Roberts. As I said, when I was at the Intel Science
Fair, I was absolutely astonished at the level at which these
students work. These are 17, 18 year olds. A colleague of mine
at New England Biolabs has a daughter who is now 18. When she
was 16, she was doing science fair projects that were only
possible because she had access to the Internet through our
company and to literature through our company. At her high
school, she had no access to this. High schools can't afford
access to the literature.
And I think we often do a great disservice to our students
by denying them access to the resources they need. We often
think they are not ready for it. We are wrong. These good
students, they need access to this material. And they are the
future. This is the future of science. This is where we are
going. We have to do everything possible to put them in touch
with the information.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for that response.
Let me ask Professor Colamarino, the NIH policy provides
the public with access to medical research. How would expanding
the policy to other areas of science help patients with
information that would be relevant to their illnesses?
Ms. Colamarino. There are many Federal programs that fund
research beyond just the NIH. And I think success in tackling
these very complex disorders is only going to come from using a
very integrative approach to examining the data. Speaking
specifically about autism, which is a very complex biological
and behavioral disorder, you need to have information from
everything that ranges not just from the biomedical to, say,
the psychological to the educational as well.
Mr. Clay. Some say that granting access to STM articles
does not help the non-professional, such as patients and their
families. How do you respond to that?
Ms. Colamarino. I travel this country, sometimes up to 90
percent of the time, meeting with these families and lecturing
to them. I have found them to be nothing but sophisticated in
their ability to interpret and read these papers. In the
instances where they have questions, they print them out and
they bring them to their care providers. This is, the families
are starved for information. This would very much help provide
them with what they are missing.
Mr. Clay. Mr. Maxwell.
Mr. Maxwell. When you asked about the extension of this
policy more broadly, it is very important to recognize that
while experts are very valuable and need to be looked to, there
is information, experience, expertise available far beyond
those people we would designate as an expert in a particular
area. That is one of the real advantages of thinking about
broad access. Because we can't know in advance who is going to
make this discovery, who is going to buildupon it, who is going
to have some entrepreneurial take on it to create a new
business.
We don't know that in advance. If we simply say, ``if you
can afford it, you can get it,'' or ``if you are an expert you
can get it.'' That misses the real point of openness, which is
to open to a broad and democratic group of people who can take
the information and make it more valuable.
Mr. Clay. Which takes me to my next question. Ms. Terry,
several witnesses have referred to access to research data. I
understand that access to data is very different and that
publishers agree that data should be made available. Can you
explain how this is different from access to journal articles?
And should we be focusing on ensuring that data resulting from
Government-funded research is made available?
Ms. Terry. Thanks very much for that question. I think we
should be doing both. And the reason for that is the articles
themselves are the distillation of the research data that has
been done by intelligent people who are experts in a certain
way. And I completely agree with Mr. Maxwell that then those
need to be released into the ecosystem that will allow them to
be enhanced more greatly.
The data itself, from publicly funded research as well,
should be shared broadly, including, I would say, anything that
touches a patient. So, clinical trial data, biospecimen data,
etc. But we really need both. Because there right now is way
more information than we can ever, ever deal with. And we need
to have the hearts and mind of all the individuals who care
from every discipline looking at this data and looking at these
research articles.
Mr. Clay. Let me just make an editorial comment. I hear
witnesses all the time. I have never had a witness come in and
admit that they committed a crime. You admitted that you stole
information and I guess you were driven by passion and a love.
I have to compliment you on your being so straightforward and
forthcoming.
Dr. Shulenburger, some have argued that in the current STM
publishing model, the American public is taxed twice, once to
provide the billions of dollars for the research and again to
provide the hundreds of thousands of dollars for public
institutions to buy back access to the results of that
research. Can you explain what is meant by this argument?
Dr. Shulenburger. I think it is at least partially true.
Public institutions are indeed funded by tax dollars as the
research is. The cost of that research has risen to a point
that we can't afford it, as you have heard, can't make it
available to our own scientists.
I said partially true, the journal publishers certainly add
value. But they don't add sufficient value to justify keeping
the articles that are produced behind gates for the entirety of
the article's life. And that is the current situation. What we
are asking for is, remove that tax after a year. Let the
journal publishers make their return during the embargo period
and then let's make sure that the public has full access to
that which they paid for.
Mr. Clay. Thank you.
Ms. Nancarrow, are the reports generally in a usable form
for the general public?
Ms. Nancarrow. The reports meaning? I am sorry, Mr.
Chairman, to what do you refer in terms of the reports?
Mr. Clay. The research. The publishers' reports.
Ms. Nancarrow. The published reports. I am sorry, could you
repeat the question?
Mr. Clay. Basically, it is the published reports that they
provide to the public. Are they in useable form?
Ms. Nancarrow. I think it depends on the type of submission
that we receive. But generally, they are in an understandable
form to an expert panel. But they are, I think, to quote Ms.
Terry, there is an interpretive process that occurs after that.
Mr. Clay. Ms. Terry.
Ms. Terry. I would also say that the output of all these
journals is understandable. And certainly to a certain degree,
there are opportunities then to understand further. I certainly
learned a lot reading 400 articles on pseudoxanthoma elasticum,
something, as my husband says, we didn't know a gene from a
hubcap when we started.
But all of this information has with it the ability to
understand using dictionaries, encyclopedias and other experts.
So it is in a usable form, and we are using it every day,
hundreds of thousands of us.
Mr. Clay. So you have to decipher and interpret?
Ms. Terry. Sure. Just like if I read my auto repair manual,
I occasionally have to look up a word. But I can learn, and so
can the general public.
Mr. Clay. Thank you. And let me thank this panel for your
testimony, for your indulgence with this committee. You
certainly bring a different perspective to this committee.
I appreciate your service, appreciate your coming in. This
panel is dismissed.
Our final panel consists of one witness, Dr. David Lipman
of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Lipman is the
Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information,
a Division of the National Library of Medicine at the National
Institutes of Health. Appointed in 1989, he is overseeing the
development of NCBI as a nationally and internationally
recognized resource for molecular biology information.
Dr. Lipman is an elected member of the National Academy of
Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, just to name a few. Welcome, Dr. Lipman.
It is the policy of this subcommittee to swear in all
witnesses. I would ask you to rise and raise your right hand.
[Witness sworn.]
Mr. Clay. Thank you, and you may be seated. Let the record
reflect that the witness answered in the affirmative. We will
allow you 5 minutes to make an opening statement, Dr. Lipman.
STATEMENT OF DAVID J. LIPMAN, M.D., DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CENTER
FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY INFORMATION, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE,
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND
HUMAN SERVICES
Dr. Lipman. Chairman Clay, it is my pleasure to testify
before you today. My name is David Lipman. I am the Director of
the National Center for Biotechnology Information [NCBI], at
the National Library of Medicine, within the National
Institutes of Health, an agency of the Department of Health and
Human Services.
NCBI was established by Congress in 1988 as a national
resource for molecular biology information. NCBI maintains more
than 40 data bases, including GenBank, the data base of all
known DNA sequences, and PubMed Central [PMC], the archive of
journal articles in the biomedical sciences. PMC is also the
repository for NIH-funded articles submitted in compliance with
the NIH public access policy.
We launched PMC 10 years ago in collaboration with a number
of publishers who deposited their journal articles in PMC to
make them more widely accessible. Our experience has
illustrated the benefits that a central repository could have,
not only for scientists, but for doctors, researchers and the
general public as well.
In 2005, NIH announced a voluntary public access policy.
The policy requested recipients of NIH funding to deposit a
copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts in PMC. The policy
permitted delay of public availability of the article for up to
12 months after publication. However, compliance was only at 5
percent.
To improve compliance, Congress in the Consolidated
Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2008 instructed NIH to make
the public access policy mandatory. This had a dramatic effect
on compliance. Of the 88,000 NIH-funded articles published in
2009, 70 percent have been submitted to PMC and that figure
continues to grow.
With increased content has come increased usage. On a
typical weekday, 740,000 articles are retrieved by 420,000
different users. Last year, 99 percent of the articles in PMC
were downloaded at least once, and 28 percent were retrieved
more than 100 times. Annual operating costs for the public
access system are approximately $3.5 million to $4 million per
year, which represents a small fraction of NIH's budget
authority of $30 billion per year. Our costs are low because of
the infrastructure and expertise that the National Library of
Medicine has developed over many years.
The success of the NIH model has stimulated similar efforts
in other countries. Major biomedical funding organization in
the U.K. and Canada, for example, have public access policies
similar to NIH's, and both countries use PMC software for their
repositories. This collaboration expands access for U.S. users
to research done worldwide.
But to look at PMC as just a repository for scientific
articles is to miss the bigger picture. PMC is an integral part
of a larger information infrastructure that is accelerating
discovery. Articles in PMC are entry points into a vast body of
biomedical information maintained by NCBI and the Library of
Medicine. Every day, users download over 13 trillion bytes of
data, which is equivalent to all the books in the Library of
Congress.
Interpreting these data requires access to the underlying
knowledge that is embodied in scientific articles. By having
PMC articles integrated with our other data bases, we are able
to create linkages among these resources that can advance
scientific discovery. For example, during the recent flu
pandemic, NCBI was the major site for collecting all flu
sequences. Within months, we had over 20,000 viral sequences
from around the world.
Through use of our system, a researcher could read an
article on drug resistant variants of the flu virus, and with
the click of a mouse, compare new isolates to all other flu
variants to gain new insights into flu epidemiology. As this
example illustrates, PMC and the NIH public access policy
ensure that the knowledge that is generated by the Government's
investment in research enables continued progress in biomedical
science, having a comprehensive resource that integrates
knowledge and data, speeds the discovery process that is
critical for improving human health.
Thank you for the opportunity to present our experiences to
you. I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Lipman follows:]
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Mr. Clay. Thank you, Dr. Lipman.
Let me ask you, why is it important for there to be
Government-run data bases of federally funded research
articles? For example, what do you think about requiring the
Government to link to the original journal's Web site in order
to read the articles?
Dr. Lipman. Well, our experience, I think we found several
important advantages of having the actual content available at
the National Library of Medicine. For one thing, the Library of
Medicine has been archiving the literature for 150 years. The
historical record is that archiving is done by libraries, not
by publishers. So this is very precious information, and we
really need to have long-term archiving.
Two, when the content is not being used directly on your
site, when there are problems, problems with the underlying
data, problems in terms of being able to connect to other kinds
of information, we just can't find that out. The reason why so
many Web sites really find it valuable to mine the way people
use their Web site is they can improve it by seeing how it is
being used.
We have been doing this for several years. We call it our
discovery initiative. We can provide quantitative information
on how users improve their use of the resource by us being able
to follow what they are doing and actually train the system
instead of trying to train the users. So that is just a few of
the reasons why we find it really critical that the archive be
available.
In addition, our outside advisors, we did try a link out
option for a period of time in the beginning of PubMed Central,
probably about 10 years ago, actually at the start. We had a
number of problems with doing that, and they ultimately advised
us to stop that option because of the problems that we faced.
Mr. Clay. Out of curiosity, have you been able to digitize
and make that 150 years worth of research and knowledge
accessible to the public?
Dr. Lipman. That is a very exciting prospect. But we have
begun some of that. I will say one thing, our initial advisors
in PubMed Central said, the information in the older articles
is very valuable. What about the participating publishers, the
publishers, and there are quite a few, hundreds of them,
hundreds of journals voluntarily, even before the public access
policy, were collaborating with us in doing this. We worked
with them and the British government, the Wellcome Trust and
the British Government provided funds for us to digitize
articles going back to the 1800's. This included articles from
the American Society of Microbiology, where there was
tremendously interesting data on the Spanish flu from 1918 and
other diseases where, while they didn't have the molecular
biology methods, they did have doctors' observations and
epidemiological data that has proved valuable.
So that is a great point. And to the extent that we have
been able to do this, we have found it has been tremendously
beneficial.
Mr. Clay. Wonderful. Doctor, I understand that it has only
been a few years. But how has the NIH policy affected research,
and how do you believe it has affected publishing?
Dr. Lipman. I don't know how to say this the right way, but
10 years ago, when we were starting PubMed Central, we heard a
lot of the same concerns that the publishers raised. Ten years
has gone by and a lot of those things didn't happen.
So we heard those same things again 5 years ago when there
was the start of the public access policy. Now it has been in
full force in a mandatory form for 2 years. And at least we are
not aware of dramatic changes because of that.
On the other hand, as we said, we have a heck of a lot more
articles that are now being intensively used by people around
the United States. We are seeing a lot of benefits already, at
least in terms of usage. It takes a while before that
translates into differences in health care and so forth. But
usage has to come first.
Mr. Clay. So I would assume the scientific community is no
different than the rest of American society, we tend to resist
change initially, and then after the initial shock and they get
over it, then they embrace the change. Have you see widespread
use and increasing use of your site?
Dr. Lipman. Yes, actually there has been about a doubling,
I think, for many aspects of usage just since 2008. So yes, we
do see an increased use. And actually, I would make an
important point, that as more data, more articles are in PubMed
Central, we see a concomitant increase in usage. It is sort of
proportional. We find that for all of our data bases, the more
comprehensive they are, the more the usage is. They just track
right along with each other.
Mr. Clay. If the platform used to support PubMed Central is
portable, can other agencies use this to establish their own
repositories?
Dr. Lipman. Thank you for that question. Absolutely, we
would be pleased to help any agency in that manner. Frankly,
the expertise that the Library of Medicine has had over 10
years of doing this, I think, could be used in many ways to
help the other agencies from simply consulting in advice to
using software like PubMed Central, to even having the Library
of Medicine do the first phase of the creation of the
Government-wide archive. In other words, the sort of librarian
aspect of getting the content from publishers or from authors,
making sure it is in a stable, uniform digital format, and then
providing at least simple forms of retrieval across it all. We
could do that and I think we could do it very cost effectively.
We could project those costs.
But then for domain-specific usage, things that are very
important for some areas of physics or meteorology or other
areas outside of our expertise, those articles could be pulled
into an agency-specific, domain-specific archive. So I think
there is a whole range of ways that the experience of the
Library of Medicine could be used to make this succeed.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for that response. Last question. Can
you describe the process by which researchers submit their work
to NIH? Is it a difficult process to comply with?
Dr. Lipman. Right now, there are 900 journals that have
arrangements with the Library of Medicine so that the content
comes in automatically. They have it in one digital form, we
convert it into our format. And the author doesn't really need
to do anything. That is about 40 percent of the articles.
For the 60 percent remaining, the author does have to
upload the manuscript to our site. But that process takes about
10 minutes. So I would say 10 minutes in the course of 6 months
of research, I would say that is reasonably easy.
Mr. Clay. Pretty reasonable.
Let me thank you, and thank all of the witnesses on all
three panels who indulged us today, who gave of their time to
come. I will say that public access to federally funded
research was a different topic for me, but I certainly learned
a little today.
And with that, this hearing is adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 5:18 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
[Additional information submitted for the hearing record
follows:]
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