Public access policy in the United States: Impact of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

The 2013 memorandum, ‘Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research’, issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), was a highly significant milestone in expanding public access to the peer-reviewed articles resulting from federally funded research and to the data on which those articles were based. While OSTP drew on a variety of inputs in developing their requirements, the report from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was particularly influential. Established in June 2009, at the request of the House Committee on Science and Technology, the Roundtable included a small group of librarians, publishers, university provosts and information science researchers representing a broad range of experiences and perspectives. The recommendations in the Roundtable's January 2010 report were incorporated into the Reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act, which provided legislative direction and support for the OSTP Memorandum. While much of the rhetoric and debate surrounding open access has been heated and hyperbolic, the Roundtable was a uniquely successful effort to bridge ideological divides and develop recommendations to inform federal policy. Imagine, then, the scene at the Capitol Lounge, a favourite watering hole for Congressional and White House staff. ‘We've got to do something! My boss is getting hammered by both sides and he's getting fed up’. There's that bill that the librarians are pushing. Sounds pretty noble. But the guy from AAP says it'll kill their business. Is he right? I don't know anything about publishing, and I have to take anything the lobbyists tell me with several grains of salt. I just want somebody with real expertise to give me some advice without me feeling like I'm being pitched all the time! She looks into her glass. ‘Our #2 says she knows one of the guys coming to the meeting this week. A physicist. Worked on big DOE projects for years, but runs a publishing outfit now. She thinks the boss'll be willing to sponsor a staff committee – a roundtable’. He looks at her quizzically. ‘Get a small group of outside experts to hash out a consensus. But you've got to get the right mix of people so that it doesn't turn into just more lobbying. And it's got to be a little under the radar so they can get something done. She thinks this guy might be the one to organize it. If he's willing’. ‘It's worth a shot. Let me know. I'll keep OSTP in the loop’. How did it come to such a pass, that stakeholders of the scholarly community who had worked hand in hand for decades were now attacking each other for undermining the very basis of scientific communication? The authors of this article had the opportunity to play a key role in the development of public access policies in the United States through their participation in the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. Here we describe the Roundtable's genesis and impact. Supporters of open access had been building momentum since the mid-1990s. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), as the primary advocacy organization, developed a strategy that would force open access through legislation, fuelled by a rhetorical approach that cast publishers as enemies of science, corruptly locking up research in pursuit of profit. Librarians, already buffeted by increasing subscription prices in a time of tightening university budgets, saw this legislative campaign as an opportunity to weaken the publishers' market power in the course of expanding free access to taxpayer-funded research. In 2000, a petition by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) sought to pressure publishers into immediately adopting an open access model regardless of the financial consequences. By early 2004 OA advocates were working with the NIH (as well as with universities and other funding agencies) to develop policies requiring that articles from grant-funded research be made open. These early campaigns treated all science publishers as a monolithic adversary, despite wide variations in business models and practices. Certainly, the pricing policies of the larger commercial publishers seemed to reflect a captive market in which their journal prices increasingly exceeded their publication costs. The substantial profit margins of the largest made them acutely vulnerable to charges of unfair exploitation. Society publishers, whose margins and subscription rates were generally modest, had seen themselves as fierce defenders of science, but they also viewed an immediate shift to OA as an existential threat. They pushed back. The DC Principles Coalition, comprising 73 non-profit publishers with nearly 400 journals, was formed in 2004 to counter the lobbying by SPARC and its allies (Internet Archive, 2008). The perceived magnitude of the threat was shared by all publishers, and the societies were soon joined by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), principally through their Professional and Scholarly Publishing division, which brought the major commercial publishers with their substantial lobbying muscle to the table. If there had ever been a possibility for the OA advocates and the publishers to work together to develop new economic models, it was quickly lost amid the acrimony. The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), was introduced in 2006. FRPAA's backers hoped to legislate something similar to the NIH policy for all federally funded research. In response, the AAP arranged to have the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act introduced. This bill was intended to eviscerate the NIH policy and prevent any similar policies in the future. By 2008, the landscape had devolved to an aggressive, adversarial legislative battle between two warring factions: on one side were open access partisans, who framed their objectives in moral terms, dismissing the fundamental economic issues involved in the major industry shift they were demanding. Publishers, with a group of highly profitable commercial journal publishers now in the lead, believed OA represented a potentially lethal blow to their business model and sought to prevent any government-mandated free access. It was in this climate of inflammatory rhetoric and mutual condemnation that the plan for the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable emerged through a number of meetings and conversations in the spring of 2009. On 29 January, a public symposium entitled ‘Author Deposit Mandates for Federal Research Grantees’ was held under the auspices of the National Research Council's newly formed Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI). ‘The symposium was chaired by the BRDI Chair, Michael Lesk and the representatives of the following organizations made presentations and participated in the discussion: American Physiological Society, American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Society for Science and the Public and publisher of Science News, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) (National Academies, n.d.).’ The intent of the symposium was to further discussion about the issues involved in extending something like the NIH Public Access Policy to other federal funding agencies, but the participants rolled out all the familiar arguments and no progress was made. This led at least some of the participants to begin to investigate alternatives for exploring the issues. These discussions led to a meeting on February 10 with Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), then Chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology. At this meeting, facilitated by Dr. Dahlia Sokolov, Staff Director for the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, Gordon agreed to sponsor the Roundtable. Attending were lobbyist Tony Podesta (on behalf of Reed Elsevier), Eric Massant and Steve Manza from Reed Elsevier and Fred Dylla, Executive Director of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). Sokolov and Dylla knew each other from her time as an AIP Fellow several years earlier and had been in conversation about finding a productive way forward. At the conclusion of the meeting, Dylla was tasked with drafting a charge for the Roundtable and developing a list of potential participants. Dylla emphasized the importance of outreach to and buy-in from the research university community. At about this time, a joint statement calling for universities to ensure the broadest possible access to their work was issued by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Coalition for Networked Information and NASULGC. This document, The University's Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship—A Call to Action (ARL, 2009), outlined a set of principles and recommendations that were very much in keeping with the spirit of the Roundtable concept. Dylla was able to persuade John Vaughn, Executive Vice President of AAU and one of the authors of the document, to chair the Roundtable. When finally assembled, the group was a very carefully balanced mix: Three university provosts, three librarians (one of whom had been a provost), executives of four publishing companies—large, small, commercial, not-for-profit—and three scholarly communication researchers (see the end of the article for names and affiliations). On 19 June, the group met with members of the House Committee on Science and Technology and their staff. According to the official invitation from Sokolov, Committee Chair Gordon had ‘promised the scholarly publishers that he would host an off-the-record roundtable to try to get past the old arguments and facilitate a way forward in terms of federal policy for our funding agencies’. Sokolov went on to say ‘[t]he White House Office of Science and Technology Policy itself is in the early stages of thinking about an overarching federal policy, and they will be participating in this roundtable as well’ (Sokolov, personal communication, 2 June 2009). The evening before the meeting most of the group gathered for dinner in a private room at the Tabard Inn. Everyone in the group knew somebody, but no one knew everybody. Dylla and Vaughn believed that this dinner, and the ones that preceded each of the roundtable's subsequent meetings, were critical to the group's success. They deliberately sought people whose opinions and backgrounds covered a wide spectrum of views on the key issues. The members would come to the group with some perspectives that were very much at odds with each other. For consensus positions to be found, it would be necessary to establish a basis for candour and trust. The participants would need to express their disagreements freely, while listening openly, with a willingness to consider changing their minds. They were to represent their own views, not serve as mouthpieces of the organizations they worked for. Confidentiality was essential. They would follow the venerable Chatham House Rule, whereby no person's comments would be quoted by name outside of the meeting room. At that first meeting, Sokolov laid out the charge. The Roundtable would carry out a series of candid discussions aimed at defining a consensus vision for exploiting the capacity of the internet and digital communications to expand access to research results, while preserving the essential aspects of scholarly publishing. She was joined by Diane DiEuliis, Assistant Director for Life Sciences in the OSTP, who affirmed President Obama's commitment to the provision of public access to government-funded information and indicated that OSTP would be issuing a formal request for information (RFI) on the topic in the future. The participants were each time to describe their of expertise and the indicated that the Roundtable would be by representatives of the House Science and Technology Committee with support and advice from staff in the White House Office of Science and Technology and for a House Science and Technology Roundtable Public Access to Federal Research and 29 2009. In a June to the participants Sokolov are the list of participants and the that was a with in the The I made was to the Committee name from the we in the of the since we from any of role following the conclusion of the 19 June agreed on free to with the participants agreed at the conclusion of the meeting that the Roundtable would be more it John Vaughn, as to host subsequent meetings at the AAU of the Committee and OSTP meetings by but as participants. funding other support was provided by the Committee and AAP each for with the Roundtable this way that the report represented the views of the participants. 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