Elias Zerhouni was interviewed by Susan Morissey in Chemical and
Engineering News: July 3, 2006 Volume 84, Number 27 pp. 12-17
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/84/8427zerhouni.html
Zerhouni: "What I've found with [the open access] issue is
paralysis. You have the zealots on one side who are hammering for
open access right away. And then on the other side, you have the
zealots who say that open access is absolutely not right. In the
middle is the taxpayers' interest.
"I'm not driven by what the popular thing to do is; I'm driven by
what's right. I believe that, number one, NIH needs a database of the
research it funds so that it can have accountability and the ability
to analyze its own portfolio. Our scientists must also have access
to our portfolio of research so they can see what we've funded.
So there's an internal need and an external need for accountability.
"It is also important that at some point the public, which pays
for 99.5% of this research, is not prevented from having access to
it. But this access should not be done at the expense and viability
of peer-reviewed scientific publishing -- whether it be nonprofit or
for profit.
"I believe very strongly that a happy medium can be found. But if
the happy medium causes a loss of viability in being able to produce
good articles and good journals, it won't work."
(1) It is hard to see why it is zealotry to insist that researchers
need *immediate* rather than delayed access to publicly funded research
findings -- or how the tax-paying public's interest is in the middle!
Public research is not funded to have its uptake, usage and applications
(to benefit the public that funds it) embargoed from all those
*researchers* who cannot afford access to the journal in which it happens
to be published. Open access has been demonstrated to both increase and
*accelerate* research usage and impact. Immediate access is the growth
tip for rapidly progressing fields of research. Needlessly delaying
access at the growth tip produces a counterproductive and unjustifiable
bottleneck that does not serve the interests of research progress or
the public that funded it.
Nor is there as yet any evidence whatsoever that immediate access
"causes a loss of viability in being able to produce good articles
and good journals": This is being assumed, a priori, instead of being
tested objectively, by requiring immediate access, monitoring the outcome
annually, and making suitable adjustments only if and when there is ever
any evidence that they are needed.
What induces paralysis is making these adjustments a priori, as NIH has
done, requesting instead of requiring open access, and allowing it to
be delayed instead of immediate. The failure of the NIH request policy
is already apparent after the needless loss of two years of potential
research impact and progress. The needless losses in research usage and
impact owing to access delays will also become measurable with time. In
the meanwhile, the maximization of research access and progress are kept
in a needless state of paralysis that is anything but a "middle ground."
(2) The primary and urgent purpose of open access is certainly not so that
"scientists have access to [NIH's] portfolio of research so they can see
what [NIH] has funded"! It is so scientists can use and apply the research
findings, immediately, for the benefit of the public that funded it for that
very purpose.
(3) It is true that "It is also important that at some point the public,
which pays for 99.5% of this research, is not prevented from having
access to it" -- but that is not the primary purpose of open access! Its
purpose is immediate scientific usage and applications, for the benefit
of the public ("CURES").
(4) Even though it is certainly not the primary reason for open access
that "NIH needs a database of the research it funds so that it can
have accountability and the ability to analyze its own portfolio," NIH
*can* have that portfolio by requiring immediate deposit without even
necessarily requiring that the articles be made publicly accessible
immediately! Individual scientists who need to use them immediately,
however, could have immediate access through the simple expedient of the
EMAIL-EPRINT-REQUEST button that is now being implemented in researchers'
own institutional repositories.
Hence the "happy medium" is to require immediate deposit in the
researchers' own institutional repositories and to harvest the deposits
into PubMed after whatever embargo period NIH judges necessary (a
priori) to insure that this is not "done at the expense [of the]
of peer-reviewed scientific publishing"
A priori deposit embargoes are instead guarantors of continued paralysis,
a happy outcome for no one.
"I'm not driven by what the popular thing to do is; I'm driven by
what's right... I believe... a happy medium can be found. But if
the happy medium causes a loss of viability in being able to produce
good articles and good journals, it won't work."
Requesting delayed deposit in PubMed instead of requiring immediate
deposit is not a happy medium, and it has already been shown to be
nonviable. And the way the viability of an adaptation is determined
in biological evolution is through its adaptive consequences. There
is an element of "intelligent design" in this, in requiring research
self-archiving at all, and we already know that its consequences for
research and researchers are positive. We don't yet know what effect
it will have on publishing, except that to date -- after 15 years of
spontaneous self-archiving, which has in some fields reached 100% --
it has had no negative effect at all.
The happy medium is to require immediate deposit and allow delayed
access-setting. And the way to find out whether or not it will work
is to do it, and thereby test objectively whether it causes any "loss of
viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals."
That's not what's popular; it's what's right: for research and
researchers, and for the tax-paying public that funds them, and for
whose benefit the research is conducted. Journals need to adapt to what
is best for research, researchers and the public. Otherwise it's the
happy tail wagging the unhappy dog.
"A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4092.html
"How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate" (June 2006)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5399.html
Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri Jul 07 2006 - 14:10:00 BST