FRPAA reservations

I’m not as bothered by the notion of more government involvement in the scholarly communication process as some of the publishers among the DC Principles folks are.  I suppose this is due to my long association with the National Library of Medicine and the respect and trust I have for the people who work there.  Nonetheless, those who blithely dismiss the concerns expressed by the publishers as nothing more than venal obfuscation should reflect on the current administration's track record in supporting the free and open dissemination of scientific information – the EPA libraries debacle is only the tip of a very ugly iceberg. 

The recent Elsevier/HHMI deal, and the similar one with the Wellcome Trust, might give some people pause as well – would supporters of FRPAA be as enthusiastic about it if the end result is a system in which the commercial publishers are paid a couple of thousand bucks each for depositing the author manuscripts in PMC or some other open archive?  Why is that a better deal for taxpayers than having authors publish their work in society journals that already make their content freely available after an embargo period?

My biggest reservation about FRPAA, however, is one that I actually haven’t seen addressed, although I’ve discussed it with some of the academic leadership here.  If we end up with a requirement that papers reporting federally funded research must be deposited, institutions are going to have to set up mechanisms to insure that this actually happens.  I’ve been watching what my university has gone through over the past couple of years to improve our collection and verification of effort reports – required by the federal government to verify that researchers are actually spending the time working on sponsored projects that they're being paid for.  This has been a huge investment of time and energy and money, and we’re still not quite at 100%.  Complying with a public access mandate is going to require another significant layer of administrative management.  This is an area where I think librarians can be very helpful, but make no mistake, it will require substantial investment, particularly for those institutions that receive the major portion of federal funding.  Is the cost worth it?  Well, we haven’t had that discussion.

It’s unfortunate that support for FRPAA has become such a litmus test for open access.  It seems to be a given that if one supports the notion that taxpayers should have better access to the results of federally funded research, then one must be a supporter of FRPAA.  This is certainly the case with the petition that is currently being bandied about.  But isn’t it possible that one could support the notion that the government "can and must act to ensure that all potential users have free and timely access on the Internet to peer-reviewed federal research findings" (as the petition says) and still think that FRPAA is poorly drafted legislation, rife with the potential for negative unintended consequences?

Comments

[William]

Another thoughtful post.

Just to clarify--in August you wrote:

"I disagree with the signatories of the DC Principles letter in their opposition to FRPAA. I have urged my Provost to sign the letter supporting it..."

I apologize if I missed your stating this elsewhere, but have you reconsidered your support for FRPAA?

Thanks,
Bill

[T Scott]

I have reconsidered. I wouldn't say that I've come all the way around to being opposed to FRPAA, but I probably wouldn't urge my Provost to sign that letter now, and I don't intend to sign the petition. I think I was initially influenced by the symbolism of the bill and I liked the notion of the federal government taking a strong stand in favor of better access to information -- but the more that I've thought about it and the various impacts that it might have, the less impressed with it I've become.

[Dorothea Salo]

The human effort involved with compliance can (and I believe will) be greatly ameliorated by technology.

In essentials, it is a protocol problem. System A (be it an IR, a journal publisher, or a disciplinary repository) needs to send a paper to System B (PubMed or a similar repository built under a FRPAA mandate) with metadata intact and understandable. System B needs to ingest the item and deal appropriately with it.

My sense is that the Object Reuse and Exchange protocol currently being worked on by the same folks who brought us OAI-PMH is designed quite well for this problem. The rest of the plumbing (a set of ticky-boxes for who funded what research) is relatively trivial.

ORE should be ready by the time FRPAA is passed. :)

[T Scott]

The technical problem is trivial, it’s the human factors that are complex. Institutions will need to be able to track every time a faculty member submits an article and has it accepted, and then insure that it gets posted to an appropriate depository. This will necessitate adding another layer of bureaucracy in order to monitor the whole process. There will have to be a training component, and some kind of mechanism to go after those individuals who refuse to participate.

The effort reporting problem is illustrative. Developing a system that enables an individual to fill out and submit a quarterly effort report is simple. Developing an administrative structure so that Deans and administrators can insure that everyone is actually doing that is a huge problem. And despite the legal requirement, we still have (just a few) people who don’t think that they have to comply with the effort reporting requirements. The institution has to demonstrate that they are taking all reasonable actions to force those people to comply.

A couple of thousand articles come out of my institution every year. We’ll need to develop mechanisms to track those, identify which ones are subject to the FRPAA requirement, and insure that they are properly handled. Good technology will be essential, of course, but it’s only a tiny part of the solution.