A consortium of 57 liberal arts colleges is calling for passage of the
 Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require scientific
 journals to make the results of publicly funded research available free
 online at some reasonable time after publication.

 The consortium says, "The Federal Research Public Access Act would be a
 major step forward in ensuring equitable online access to research
 literature that is paid for by taxpayers.  The federal government funds
 over $60 billion in research annually.  Research supported by the
 National Institutes of Health, which accounts for approximately 1/3 of
 federally funded research, produces an estimated 80,000 peer-reviewed
 journal articles each year.

 "Given the scope of research literature that would become available
 online, it is clear that adoption of the bill would have significant
 benefits for the progress of science and the advancement of knowledge."

 The group behind the effort, The Alliance for Taxpayer access
 (www.taxpayeraccess.org) says, "Access to scholarly journals has lagged
 behind the wide reach of the Internet in U.S. homes and institutions.
 Subscription barriers limit U.S. taxpayer access to research that has
 been paid for by public funds."

 Needles to say, not everyone is thrilled with the idea. The Association
 of American Publishers says, "Professional and scholarly publishers
 have expressed opposition to the bill. It would create unnecessary
 costs for taxpayers, place an unwarranted burden of research
 investigators, and expropriate the value-added investments made by
 scientific publishers - many of them not-for-profit associations who
 depend on publishing income to support pursuit of their scholary
 missions, including education and outreach for the next generation of
 U.S. scientist," according to AAP's Professional and Scholarly
 Publishing Division Chairman Brian Crawford.

 In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, AAP President and former Colorado
 Congresswoman Patricai Schroeder wrote, "Is public access a problem?
 Not with Google indexing copies of articles that authors often post on
 personal or institutional websites.  Is patients' access to medical
 literature a concern?  Most publishers will provide free or modestly
 priced copies of individual studies."

 In related news on the publication front, five major research
 universities - MIT, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, and the University of
 California at Berkeley - plan to develop a system in which they pay
 fees to open access journals for the articles published by the
 institutions' scholars.  They've set aside $100,000 and are inviting
 other insititutions to join them.

 But problems seem to be cropping up everywhere in the world of
 scientific publishing.  A report on social science journal publishing
 (www.nhalliance.org/bm-doc/hssreport.pdt) funded by the Andrew W.
 Mellon foundation found, "Analysis of the journal costs provided for
 this study confirm that a shift to and entirely new funding model in
 the pure form of open assess in which the costs of uyblishing research
 articles in journals are paid by the authors or by a funding agency,
 and readers have access to these publications for free, is not feasible
 for this group of journals."

 The study quotes a February 2007 statement by the American Association
 of University Presses urging caution in the push to open access:
 Bypassing this laboratory state of experimentation and development and
 plunging straight into pure open access, as attractive as it may sound
 in theory, runs the serious risk of sestabilizing scholary
 communications in ways that would disrupt the progress of scholarship
 and the advancement of knowledge."

 The Mellon report looked at 8 journals in the social sciences.

 Meanwhile, The Nature Publishing Group will launch its first open
 access journal, Nature Communications, in 2010.  They'll charge authors
 an article processing fee, still to be announced.  An NPG spokesmand
 told THE SCIENTIST, "Scholarly publication is on the cusp of yet more
 radical changes with increasing commitment by research funders to cover
 the costs of open access making experimentation with new business
 models more viable."

 The Federal Research Public Access Act will probably not be acted on
 until health care legislation is resolved.

 NATURAL HAZARDS OBSERVER             Reproduction with
 INSTITUTE OF BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE      acknowledgment is
 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER    permitted and encouraged.

 NOVEMBER 2009