The publisher anti-Open-Access lobby is trying to use a time when the
economy is down and the head of NIH is
out<http://www.nih.gov/about/director/index.htm> to
slip through a Bill<http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&tab=nw&q=nih%20conyers%20bill%20>
that
would undo one of the most positive things Congress has done for science:
the NIH Public Access
Act<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=National%20Institutes%20of%20Health%20%28NIH%29>,
which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the
public that paid for it.

The Conyers Bill<http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&tab=nw&q=nih%20conyers%20bill%20>
is
now trying to overturn the Public Access Act on the basis of copyright
double-talk that would be ludicrous if it were not so ominous:

The published reports of publicly funded research findings are given away by
their researcher-authors free for all in order to maximize their usage and
impact. The Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" their work in exactly the
same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers,
produced and sold by their authors to maximize their royalty income: The
tendentiously misnamed "Fair Copyright in Research Works
Act<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.6845:>"
would rescind NIH's requirement that the results of the research it funds
with taxpayer money should be deposited, free for all, on the Web.

The Conyers Bill's copyright arguments -- almost transparently contrived and
arbitrary -- have been decisively refuted point for point by Law
Professor Michael
Carroll <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/468-guid.html> and
other experts, just as all the other far-fetched, self-serving arguments
marshalled by the publisher anti-OA lobby have (despite the hiring of "
pit-bull <http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7126/full/445347a.html>"
Eric Dezenhall as public-relations consultant) been
repeatedly<http://blogsearch.google.ca/blogsearch?hl=en&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active&ie=UTF-8&q=%28critique+OR+rebuttal%29+%28publisher+OR+publishing%29++blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&btnG=Search+Blogs>
 rebutted <http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+site:listserver.sigmaxi.org+harnad+(critique+OR+rebuttal)+(publisher+OR+publishing)>each
time they were unleashed.

*It is time not only for OA advocates, but the general public -- both US and
worldwide (because US OA policy has vast global implications) -- to make
their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access Policy and against the
Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright. TheAlliance for Taxpayer
Access<http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/> is
hard at work to save the NIH Mandate; please consult them on how you can
help. You can also express your support for mandating more OA rather than
less<http://obamacto.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/72264-require-open-access-for-publicly-funded-research>,
to President Obama.*

This would also be an opportune time to shore up the NIH Mandate itself with
a small but important change in implementational detail that will not only
increase its reach and make it a far better model for emulation worldwide,
but it will also strengthen it against mischievous attempts like the Conyers
Bill<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?serendipity%5Baction%5D=search&serendipity%5BsearchTerm%5D=conyers&serendipity%5BsearchButton%5D=%3E>
to
undermine it:

*(1)* Open Access is Open Access regardless of where on the Web a paper is
freely accessible.

*(2)* Currently, the NIH mandate specifically stipulates deposit in a
Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR), PubMed
Central<http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/>
.

*(3)* The majority <http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php> of journals already
formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it *only in
the author's ownInstitutional Repository
(IR)<http://roar.eprints.org/?action=home&q=&country=&version=&type=institutional&order=name&submit=Filter>
rather
than a Central (3rd-party) Repository
(CR)<http://roar.eprints.org/?action=home&q=&country=&version=&type=subject&order=name&submit=Filter>
*. (This is because they fear that endorsing deposit in 3rd party CRs would
open the door to free-riding on their content by rival publishers.)

*(4)* Apart from being immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider objection,
IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities and research
institutions in the world: That makes it a much more diffuse, hence
difficult target for the publisher anti-OA publisher lobby than PubMed
Central, NIH or Congress.

*(5)* IRs also make it possible to deposit papers as "Closed Access" rather
than Open Access during any publisher embargo period. The Closed-Access
paper's metadata (authors, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are freely
accessible and searchable webwide, and link to an IR
Button<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html>
that
allows individual users to email the author an automatic request for an
individual copy for research use with just one click, which the author can
in turn fulfill with just one click, almost instantaneously. Over 60% of
journals already endorse immediate OA for IR deposits. The Button provides
"Almost OA" for the rest, to tide over researcher needs during any embargo.

*(6)* Hence if the NIH deposit mandate specifically stipulated deposit in
the author's IR, rather than deposit in PubMed Central, it could harvest the
deposit's metadata to PubMed Central, harvest the full-text after the
allowable embargo, and moot most of the copyright issues, while indirectly
providing "Almost OA" even during the embargo (via the Request-a-Copy
Buttons of the global network of IRs distributed across the planet).

*(7)* This small change in implementational detail in NIH's funder mandate
would also motivate and reinforce the adoption of *institutional* mandates
at all NIH's fundees' institutions, which would in turn help reinforce and
protect the NIH mandate (from Conyers-like attacks) as well as extending it
to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded.

*(8)* Stipulating IR deposit rather than CR deposit will also make the NIH
funder mandate a model that can be emulated worldwide, globalizing the
adoption of both funder and institutional mandates and helping to usher in
universal OA at long last<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html>
.

*Stevan Harnad <http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/>*
American Scientist Open Access
Forum<http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html>