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REPORT
Bill grants public free access to federal research
By Jon Gingerich
Journalists, educators, marketers and a
public looking for public access to
scientific research may no longer
have to pay costly fees or dig through countless
library stacks for hard-to-find articles.
Introduced in the House in April, the
Federal Research Public Access Act would
ensure free online access to federally funded
research articles that have been published in
peer-reviewed journals.
Introduced by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA)
and accompanied by a number of bi-partisan
co-sponsors, the purpose of the bill is to provide
access and transparency to research
funded by tax dollars. If passed, the public
would have free online access to the published
research funded by eleven U.S. federal
agencies, including the Department of
Defense, Department of Transportation, the
Environmental Protection agency and the
National Science Foundation, among others.
The bill requires all federal departments
and agencies with annual extramural
research budgets of at least $100 million to
create and store online versions of their final
manuscripts in free digital repository accessible
to the public. The bill requires all federally-funded
manuscripts be placed online
in less than six months after the article has
been published.
Academic journals are an $8-billion-ayear
industry. Subscription costs to most
journals are typically very expensive, with
about 80% of a journal’s income coming
from subscriptions to academic or research
libraries. Some have wondered that if this
bill is passed — if users can bypass the need
to pay for content — that many universities
would drop their subscriptions altogether.
This could result in financial trouble for the
journal publishing industry or, at the very
least, result in raised prices for future subscriptions.
According to Heather Joseph, Executive
Director of the Scholarly Publishing
Academic Research Coalition, journals
have remained prohibitively expensive
without competition from electronic competitors,
with current profit margins between
20 and 40 percent. Journal subscribers have
typically had no choice but to abide by the
pricing controls set by the market.
“The reason journal prices keep going up
is because they can. The market for a journal
doesn’t bear any resemblance to other
consumer items you see,” Joseph said.
“Right now journals are only accessible to
people who can afford the subscriptions, and
at this point they’re so expensive that even
Harvard or Yale can’t afford to pay for all
the journals they need.”
“No one’s looking to put publishers out of
business,” she continued. “We’re looking
for a way to level the playing field. In a
print-based world the old way of doing
things made sense. In an Internet-based
world we need to give the immediacy and
availability of this information to the public.”
Joseph said journalists, who will now
have access to a host of free materials,
would especially benefit from this bill.
Scientific authors who aren’t paid for their
work, by contrast, will benefit from subsequent
citations, which results in tenure and
further federal grants.
“There are also advocacy groups and
members of the public who stand to interest
in the materials covered by this bill,” Joseph
said, “like entrepreneurs and people who
run small businesses who want research on
green energy or alternative fuels and are
interested in the stuff coming out from the
Department of Energy or the EPA.”
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MAY 2010 WWW.ODWYERPR.COM