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AAA AND THE FEDERAL RESEARCH PUBLIC
ACCESS ACT (S.2695)
Frequently Asked
Questions
In June 2006, the American Anthropological Association
(AAA) posted a statement on its website indicating that it had signed on
to a letter drafted by the Association of American Publishers (AAP)
expressing opposition to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA or
S. 2695). The letter- addressed to Senator Susan Collins (R-ME),
Chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental
Affairs, a congressional panel with oversight over the dissemination of
federally-funded research - outlined several concerns about the
legislation, shared to varying degrees by over 70 nonprofit scholarly
publishers whose publishing programs could be adversely impacted.
The AAA's decision to sign the AAP letter was subsequently questioned,
principally on the grounds that it signaled general opposition to "open
access" publishing. The following FAQs are provided to clarify the
context and intent of the AAA' decision.
What does the bill - S. 2695 -
propose?
- The bill - sponsored by Senators John Cornyn
(R-TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) - calls on federal agencies with
extramural research expenditures of over $100 million to develop public
access policies requiring recipients of federal research grants to make
their findings freely available on agency-maintained digital repositories
within six months of publication. The proposed legislation
represents an expansion of a voluntary plan initiated in 2005 by the
National Institutes of Health (NIH). This plan encouraged but did
not require recipients of NIH research grants to make their findings
public within a year of publication.
Does
AAA oppose open access?
- No. Opposition to S. 2695 does not in
any way signal AAA opposition to alternative publishing models premised on
open access principles. On the contrary, it simply indicates
opposition to the specific requirements contained in this
legislation.
- AAA recognizes that open access is a paradigm
in the ascendance and AAA's members subscribe to the ideal that public
access to scholarly research enhances the public good.
- The AAA has not yet come to any conclusion
about how its publishing enterprise should be shaped to maximize access to
its published content. A broad ranging membership conversation on
this issue is just beginning, and it is important that this conversation
be allowed to unfold without a solution being imposed on the AAA by the
federal government. The scholar-members of the AAA should ultimately
determine which business models best address the demand for information
exchange in their community. AAA's niche entry in this marketplace,
AnthroSource, is still finding its way - it must continue to be tested in
an environment free from government interference.
Does
AAA policy support open access objectives?
- Yes. In July of 2005, the AAA, under the
counsel of the AnthroSource Steering Committee and in partnership with the
University of California Press, revised its author agreement to allow
authors greater freedom of their materials post-print. As a result of the
revised author's agreement, the AAA currently has a green SHERPA rating
(http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?id=110).
- The AAA author agreement provides
authors the opportunity to fully comply with current open-access
legislation, including:
1) To use the article for educational or other scholarly
purposes of Author's own institution or company;
2) To post the
article on Author's personal or institutional website; and
3) To post
the article on free, discipline-specific public servers of preprints
and/or post prints.
- The Executive Board of the AAA passed a motion
to allow complete and free access to AnthroSource and its scholarly
content to institutions in less developed countries, tribal colleges and
historically black colleges and universities in North America, Arctic and
First Nation colleges and universities in Canada. This offer will start in
January 2007. We will provide more detail of this program in the
coming weeks.
Why did AAA sign the AAP
letter?
- The decision to sign on to the AAP letter was
driven by the need to inform Members of Congress of the potentially
disruptive effect of the proposed legislation on AAA's publishing program
at an especially critical period in its development. The letter
offered the AAA a timely vehicle through which to support a broad effort
by the scholarly publishing community to prevent a hasty and ill conceived
federal government intrusion into the publishing marketplace. By
joining the AAP effort, the AAA lent its support to the larger community
of non-profit publishers, all of whom are being challenged to adapt in a a
rapidly changing environment.
- Signing the AAP letter is best understood as a
targeted action by the AAA which achieved several objectives: 1) it
affirmed AAA's strategic relationships with other non-profit and scholarly
publishers by signaling our understanding of the general shared concerns
about S. 2695; 2) it publicly 'marked' the AAA's ongoing interest in the
open access discussion; and 3) it communicated the AAA's view that there
are better options for reconciling the twin goals of advancing the
objectives of open access and engineering viable publishing models for the
anthropology community.
What
are the concerns with the legislation?
- Publishers add significant value to the
scholarly communication process by managing and supporting the peer-review
process, the pre-production process and data conversion, and the content
hosting and distribution of the research results. These value-added
services are not federally funded. The FRPAA assumes that because
some research efforts are supported by federal funds. These funds also
support the publishing efforts. They do not. The AAA has, with help
from the Mellon Foundation and in cooperation with the University of
California, made significant investments in the AnthroSource portal to
make our anthropology content available in digital form, easily accessible
and searchable, S. 2695 would appropriate, by federal government mandate,
the value-added product of this privately funded enterprise.
- AAA's subscription revenues could be adversely
affected by the legislation. Currently, subscriptions are the main
source of funding for the AAA publishing program. If implementation
of S. 2695 were to result in reduced subscription revenues, at a time when
ongoing financial investments are needed to further develop AnthroSource,
alternative sources of funding for the publishing program would have to be
secured. If membership dues were to substitute subscription
revenues, individual member fees would have to be doubled. Strategic
decisions
affecting the association's future publishing program should
be made through a deliberative process by AAA members and leadership, not
forced by federal legislation.
- The bill would take decision-making with
regard to the distribution of published works out of the hands of those
who do the publishing. An operating assumption underlying FRPAA is
that federal government repositories offer the most efficient and
user-friendly vehicles to facilitate public access to scientific
research. This is a highly dubious assumption given that nonprofit
and for-profit scientific publishers have already invested heavily in
understanding what drives the market for public access to scientific
research, and designed delivery systems and products accordingly.
Anthropologists and their partners in the publishing community - not
government administrators - are in a much better position to know how to
efficiently disseminate (federally or otherwise funded) anthropological
research to the public in a manner consistent with public access
principles and private sector innovation.
- S. 2695 fails to address the practical and
financial implications of administering dedicated federal repositories for
research papers. Among issues the legislation does not clarify are:
1) how much federal funding triggers the submission requirement; 2) who is
responsible for implementing the requirement; and 3) to what extent
federal appropriations will support online agency repositories; and 4) how
the content of such repositories can be insulated from ideologically
driven and partisan politics. Further, as is the case whenever
federal regulations apply, it is likely that non-profit publishers will
have to spend additional time and resources complying with the
legislation, resulting in reduced investments in their own publishing
programs.
- There are
many experiments with alternative publishing models such as
"author-pays" models. Unfortunately, none has yet been
demonstrated to be self-sustaining. The Public Library of Science
(PLoS), regarded by many as the flagship of the open access movement,
lost almost $1 million in 2005. Author fees and advertising income
currently cover only 35% of its total costs. To help bridge the
gap, PLoS is about to increase its author-pay charges from $1,500 per
article to as much as $2,500 (or 67% increase), depending on which of
its journals an author publishes in. Similarly, BioMed Central, a
British open-access publisher, has increased author charges from $500 to
as much as $1,700 per article (an increase of 340%), and it has yet to
break even. FRPAA would insert new government-run entities into a
scientific publishing marketplace that is currently in tremendous flux
and instability. Adding the federal government into this mix will,
at best, disrupt current developments, and quite possibly shut down many
smaller scholarly publishers who need time to construct alternative
self-sustaining publishing models that will allow their publications to
survive and continue to serve the interests of their scholarly
communities.
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AAA AnthroSource
Steering Committee supports FRPAA
(letter)
AAA signals
opposition to legislation (statement)
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