Comments Results
Comments for Open Meeting on Public Access - March 20, 2008
Received via E-mail as of 03/17/2008 at 5:00 PM
Total Comments = 18

E-mail Comments for Open Meeting on Public Access - March 20, 2008

Entry Date	Last Name	First Name	Degree	Affiliation	City	State	Country	Role
3/17/2008 at  5:00 PM (via e-mail)	Phimister	James	Ph.D.	Elsevier	Philadelphia	PA	USA
	Download the full Document: Elsevier_NIH_Policy.pdf (PDF - 43kb)
3/17/2008 at  4:36 PM (via e-mail)	Binder	Steven	Ph.D.	IEEE Publications	Piscataway	NJ	USA
	Download the full Document: IEEE_Comments.pdf (PDF - 74kb)
3/17/2008 at  4:56 PM (via e-mail)	Frank	Martin	Ph.D.	American Physiological Society	Bethesda	MD	USA
	Download the full Document: APS_Comment.pdf (PDF – 240kb)
3/17/2008 at  4:25 PM (via e-mail)	Smith	Kevin	J.D.	Duke University	Durham	NC	USA
	Duke University has consistently supported public access to the output of federal funded research.  In 2006 our Provost was among a large group of high-level university administrators who signed letters supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act.  Throughout the past year our library administration has worked with the Association of Research Libraries to encourage and support the National Institutes of Health in its efforts to make the voluntary program of deposit into PubMed Central of funded research articles a requirement of the funding.  The Director of our Medical Center Library has also been very active in supporting this initiative. As the deadline to begin mandatory submission nears, Duke has engaged in planning for compliance that includes the Libraries, the offices for research support, the Vice Provost for Research and the Vice Dean of Clinical Research in the Medical School.  A memo signed by the appropriate administrators outlining our initial plan for compliance with the mandate was sent to University researchers during the last week of February 2008 and to Medical Center researchers early in March. As Duke understands the new requirement, there are three elements to institutional and authorial compliance.  First, authors must retain sufficient intellectual property rights, when they agree to publication terms, to be able to grant to the NIH a license to deposit the article in question into PMC and to make it available to the public within one year of publication.  Second, the relatively simply online deposit must be accomplished, including, in many cases, verification by the lead author of the final PMC version of the article prior to public availability.  Third, researchers will need to be able to document their compliance in progress reports, renewal applications and requests for new funding by providing PMC reference numbers for previous works.  Our approach to each of these compliance steps is outlined below. The copyright issue is certainly the most complex.  It is Duke’s strong hope and expectation that the NIH will continue to work with major STM publishers, and, indeed, with small journal publishers as well, to increase the number of journals that deposit NIH- funded research directly with PMC so that authors, whose primary concern is to advance scientific knowledge and for whom ongoing concern about copyright is a distraction from that work, will be relieved of the task. .  It is likely that Duke would also support a decision by the NIH to assert its “government purpose” license in funded research articles to allow PMC deposit without the need to negotiate a second set of licensing terms.  Until such time as these steps taken, however, Duke has developed a procedure to ensure that our researchers are able to grant the license to NIH that will be necessary for deposit. First, we have written and circulated to faculty a cover letter, signed by our research administrators, which each author is asked to include when s/he  first submits to a potential publisher an article that results from funded research.  That letter serves, first, to give any potential publisher of the article advance notice that the work is subject to the mandate.  Second, the letter stresses our hope that the publisher will either accomplish PMC deposit on behalf of the author or, at least, will include explicit language by which authors will retain the right to comply with the NIH deposit requirement.  Finally, the letter informs publishers that Duke authors will, if they have any doubt about their ability to grant the necessary license to NIH, attach an addendum to a final publication agreement retaining that right, and make their signature subject to that additional term of the contract. Again, it is our hope that this addendum will be necessary only very seldom, but we believe it will be necessary in some cases to ensure that Duke and its authors are able to comply without creating inconsistent contractual obligations. The second step in copyright compliance, obviously, is to provide the suggested addenda to faculty authors.  At Duke we have chosen simply to use the language suggested by NIH that explicitly retains a right for PMC deposit.  While we recognize that many institutions will want to use this opportunity to encourage authors to retain rights for a broader range of public access deposit opportunities, we chose this more conservative route for a couple of reasons.  First, faculty policy at Duke is that authors retain their copyright in all of their scholarly works, and any institutional action that appears to compromise that retention will require careful discussion.  The short time frame for NIH compliance suggests that a conservative approach, with the intention of using this opportunity to begin a broader conversation, is appropriate.  Second, by using this very specific language, authors will have before them a model of the rights retention clause we hope will already be found in their publication contracts.  By putting such a model in their hands, we hope it will be easier for them to determine whether  the addendum is necessary.  The materials sent to faculty do also include an offer to have the Scholarly Communications Officer, who is a librarian and a lawyer, review publication contracts whenever an author feels that would be useful. For the next stage of compliance – the actual mechanics of compliance – we are also taking a double approach in order to increase the likelihood of compliance.  From what we have learned thus far, it seems that the mechanics of deposit will be somewhat easier if the researchers perform this step themselves.  In order to make this easier, a group of librarians,  from both the Medical Center and the University Libraries, will be trained in the deposit functions and will offer to faculty their assistance in completing the deposit process.  Because some researchers will, inevitably, not wish to do this themselves, the Medical Center Library is also setting up a service by which they will oversee deposit for the small group that we expect to prefer this alternative. Finally, the Libraries will be prepared to help researchers locate the PMC reference numbers they will need to include in subsequent documentation filed with NIH.  This is consistent with the Libraries’ usual role; librarians are always prepared to assist faculty in making the most efficient use possible of all online resources. In both of these last steps especially, the University Libraries and the offices of sponsored research will work together closely to ensure that, wherever authors turn for assistance, they are given accurate and consistent information and directed to those who can help them comply with the public access requirements as efficiently as possible. Duke has established a sensible and workable policy and procedure for complying with the NIH public access mandate.  As noted  above, the best thing that the NIH can do to assist us with compliance is to encourage publishers to participate directly in depositing their content into PubMed Central within the statutory period so that both the public interest and the needs of researchers will be better served.
3/17/2008 at  4:03 PM (via e-mail)	Dylla	Frederick		American Institute of Physics	College Park	MD	USA
	Download the full Document: Zerhouni.pdf (PDF - 83kb)
3/17/2008 at  3:21 PM (via e-mail)	Jacobs	Madeleine		American Chemical Society	Washington	DC	USA
	Download the full Document: ACS_letter.pdf (PDF - 39kb)
3/17/2008 at  3:21 PM (via e-mail)	Smorodin	David		American Chemical Society	Washington	DC	USA
	Download the full Document: ACS_Mandate_Comments.pdf (PDF - 125kb)
3/14/2008 at  3:06 PM (via e-mail)	Suber	Peter		SPARC
	The new NIH public access policy serves the public interest and is long overdue.  I oppose attempts by the publishing lobby to delay its implementation. Congress asked for a mandatory policy in 2004, but the NIH adopted a voluntary policy instead.  The compliance rate for the voluntary policy ranged from 4% to 15%, and failed to meet the objectives of Congress and the agency.  It's no exaggeration to say that we've waited more than three years for the strengthened policy to take effect and exert its beneficial effects on medical research and healthcare.  Further delay would further delay those benefits. The policy has been thoroughly vetted.  The NIH released its first draft policy for a 60 day period of public comments, ending on November 2, 2004, and later extended the period by two weeks.  The agency received more than 6,000 comments, which Director Elias Zerhouni described as "overwhelmingly supportive."  In addition, the NIH held multiple meetings with stakeholders, including publishers.  The bill to strengthen the policy (Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008) was subject to amendment on six occasions from June to October 2007.  Senator James Inhofe actually filed two amendments in October, one to weaken the language on the NIH and one to delete it, but withdrew them both when he couldn't drum up enough support.  The NIH provision was subject to amendment again in December 2007, after the Bush veto, when Congress had to cut provisions to make the bill acceptable to the President. Publishers are mistaken to say that the policy violates copyright.  Indeed, the policy uses a simple, effective method to avoid any question of copyright infringement.  When NIH grantees publish articles based on NIH-funded research, they must now retain the right to comply with the public access policy, even if they transfer all their other rights to publishers.  As a result, public access by the NIH is expressly authorized by the copyright holders. The only aspect of the policy I would change is the permissible 12 month embargo between publication in a peer-reviewed journal and public access through PubMed Central.  I would reduce this to six months, the period used in similar policies from the Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), British Heart Foundation, Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, European Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, Department of Health (UK), Fund to Promote Scientific Research (Austria), Genome Canada, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), and the Wellcome Trust (UK).  Any delay is a compromise with the public interest, and delays are more harmful in medicine than in any other field. The public access policy is badly needed to insure that the large volume of high-quality medical research produced by the NIH is made available to everyone who can make use of it:  researchers whose universities cannot afford access to the full range of biomedical journals, practicing physicians without university or large-hospital affiliations, non-profit disease advocacy organizations, and patients and their families. It's not true that all who need access already have it.  The best evidence that free online access to peer-reviewed research meets a large unmet need is that open-access articles are cited 50-250% more often than non-open-access articles published in the same issues of the same journals. Sincerely, Peter Suber Senior Researcher, SPARC Visiting Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
3/14/2008 at  3:37 PM (via e-mail)	Gross	Lauren	J.D.	The American Association of Immunologists	Bethesda	MD	USA
	Download the full Document: AAI_comments.pdf (PDF - 85kb)
3/14/2008 at  4:08 PM (via e-mail)	Kosden	Laura		American Dental Association	Chicago	IL	USA
	Download the full Document: NIH_Public_Comments_ADA.doc (MS Word - 44kb)
3/13/2008 at  11:52 AM (via e-mail)	Reinhard	Robert		Community Advisory Board Member	San Francisco	CA	USA
	Download the full Document: comments_to_NIH.pdf (PDF - 14kb)
3/12/2008 at 5:53 PM (via e-mail)	Rossner	Mike	Ph.D.	Rockefeller University Press	New York	NY	USA
	Download the full Document: DHHS_letter.doc (MS Word - 250kb)
3/13/2008 at 1:13 PM (via e-mail)	Adler	Prudence	M.A., M.L.S.	Association of Research Libraries	Washington	DC	USA	Other
	Download the full Document: ltnihcomments.doc (MS Word - 64kb)
3/17/2008 at 2:02 PM (via e-mail)	Saad	Diane		Wiley-Blackwell John Wiley & Sons	Hoboken	NJ	USA
	Download the full Document: JohnWiley_Comments.pdf (PDF - 116kb)
3/17/2008 at 1:54 PM (via e-mail)	Foster	Shelagh		American Society of Clinical Oncology	Alexandria	VA	USA
	Download the full Document: ASCO_Comments.doc (278kb)
3/17/2008 at 1:12 PM (via e-mail)	Wolpert	Ann		MIT	Cambridge	MA	USA
	MIT is pleased to have the opportunity to comment on the 2008 NIH Public Access Policy, as this policy manifests one of MIT’s most deeply held values and primary commitments – making research as widely available as possible.  More open access to research directly supports MIT’s mission to “generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge, and to work with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges.”  MIT’s longstanding commitment to the principle underlying the Public Access policy is expressed in its open access innovations: the widely adopted models of OpenCourseWare and DSpace, as well as many other projects such as MIT World, TechTV, and OpenWetWare.  MIT is therefore committed to complying with the new policy not only for legal reasons, but because it expresses a key component of MIT’s fundamental mission.  Although implementing the policy will create short term challenges for MIT and its investigators, we do not view those challenges as a reason to delay implementation.  In the short term, without a broader, institutional approach in place, compliance necessarily falls to individual authors who will need to ensure they retain sufficient rights to comply with the terms of their research funding.  There is a tension inherent in this situation, which will at times leave authors and their institutions struggling with the need to execute hundreds of individual appropriate legal contracts with publishers in order to achieve compliance.  MIT’s approach to implementation assumes that over time, all players in the scholarly communication chain – research institutions, authors, funding agencies, and publishers – will need to work together to find efficient procedures and policies so that publicly funded research is shared as widely as possible, for the benefit of taxpayers and the betterment of society. In implementing the new policy, then, MIT has identified a short term strategy and intends to work diligently toward a longer term strategy.  For the short term, we’ve created a team to develop a communication plan and specific documentation for MIT authors, making them aware of the new policy and its requirements.  The team includes representatives from the Office of Sponsored Programs, the General Counsel’s Office, the Libraries, the Vice President for Research, the Chair of the faculty, and Biology Department faculty.  Our team has focused so far on written communications and face-to-face discussions meant to convey the basic requirements of the policy and to inform authors of what resources MIT has to assist them in compliance.  The documents we’ve prepared include a web page to guide authors in complying with the policy, a draft journal submission letter, and a draft one-page overview of the key aspects of the policy. We have begun drafting a letter to be sent to each NIH Principal Investigator, and an article for the faculty newsletter is in the planning stages. We are prepared to handle the inquiries we expect as of the April 7 implementation date, since MIT already makes available to its authors an amendment to publisher agreements that was developed in support of voluntary deposit in PubMed Central.  MIT additionally supports authors in compliance through a staff position in the Libraries devoted to supporting authors in retaining rights to their work. Over the longer term, we are beginning to discuss possible institutional efforts that could potentially reduce the burden on individual authors in complying with the policy.  We look forward to partnering with publishers, NIH, and others in devising structural changes that will successfully support this policy’s goal of more open access to research.
3/17/2008 at 12:05 PM (via e-mail)	Naveira	Romina		Association of American Publishers (PSP Division)	New York	NY	USA
	Download the full Document: AAP_Letter.pdf (PDF - 65kb)
3/14/2008 at 11:08 PM (via e-mail)	Heitzman	Joanne					USA
	Please, please seriously consider making available to the public all the published results of BIH research in six months. Anything longer is too long to wait.  Sometimes it is a matter of life and death and patients need to have access to this information as soon as possible.  Your interest and consideration will be greatly appreciated.

Return to Public Access Home Page