Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has submitted its contribution to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy request for contributions to its Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research.
According to BioMed Central, the success of its open access (OA) journals proves that immediate OA to the official and authoritative version of published research results is not only desirable but also achievable and sustainable.
The success of the OA model is especially notable given that, until recently, in contrast to the substantial library budgets devoted to subscriptions to serials, there has been little funding explicitly allocated by academic institutions to cover OA publication fees. Authors have therefore had to make direct use of their research grant funding in order to publish in OA journals. The Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity is seen to be an important recent initiative, involving Harvard and other leading research universities, which seeks to address this disparity by providing central institutional funding support for OA journals. This can be expected to add to the already considerable momentum driving the growth of the OA publishing model.
BioMed Central supports both the goal of OA and the goal of ensuring that the value added by publishers is properly recompensed. In contrast to some of the contributors, the publisher states that there is no need to ‘balance’ these two goals as they are not in opposition.
As noted by other participants in this debate, the benefits resulting to the scientific community from OA to research are substantial, BioMed has stated. What may be less obvious is that OA need not threaten the role of STM publishers. The OA publishing model, in which publishers are paid directly for the service of publication, is proving in practice to be just as viable a business model as the traditional model - whereby publishers recover the costs associated with publication by taking exclusive rights and then selling access via subscriptions.
Given that there is a viable business model for publishing scholarly research that does not depend on restricting access, BioMed feels no need for the US government to arbitrarily limit the extent and reach of its OA deposit requirements attached to its research funding. It recommends that the mandatory Public Access Policy which has operated successfully with respect to National Institutes of Health funding since 2008, be extended to cover all federally funded research. Also, it proposes that consideration is given, over time, to reducing or eliminating the 12 month embargo period, because this embargo period covers the very period during which the results of research are most timely and valuable. Gradual reduction of the embargo period would provide a natural mechanism to encourage publishers to adopt business models compatible with open access, while avoiding disruptive upheaval.
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