University of California Press differs from AAP on Research Works Act

Alison Mudditt, the director of the University of California Press, has just emailed me the following statement outlining the Press’ position on the controversial Research Works Act (RWA).  

We should note that the University of California Press is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which has backed the RWA.

“As part of the world’s leading public research university, University of California Press is committed to the wide dissemination of knowledge to researchers, educators, leaders, and public audiences worldwide. The issues raised by Research Works Act are complex and we welcome continued informed debate on this topic. Our perspective on these issues differs from that of AAP, and we are committed to engaging closely with scholars from all disciplines in exploring new models that retain critical features such as quality control, long-term preservation, and measures of impact and use. However, UC Press does not believe withdrawing our membership in AAP is beneficial to the resolution of this issue or to our long-term interests. Scholarly communication faces unprecedented and undeniable challenges, and we believe that rich and diverse debate is the best path to sustainable solutions.”

Statements on the RWA are also available from MIT Press, ITHAKA, and Pennsylvania State University Press here, here, and here.

Readers may also be interested in an article I wrote earlier today on the topic of the RWA, which provides some background on this controversial topic.

I invite other members of AAP to email me their views on the RWA, which I am happy to publish here. 


*** UPDATE: THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY PRESS ***

Executive director of The Rockefeller University Press Mike Rossner has today sent a letter to Rep. Carolyn Maloney who, with Rep. Darrell Issa, introduced the RWA (AKA H.R. 3699) into the US House of Representatives at the end of last year.

The Rockefeller University Press is located in Maloney's constituency, and Rossner is a resident and voter in her constituency.

The letter can be viewed here. Below is an extract:

“I want to state emphatically that I support the NIH Public Access Policy and think it should be expanded to other federal funding agencies … Enacting a law that prohibits federal funding agencies from mandating public access to the results of the research they fund will deprive the public of important information that is rightly theirs. Although this Act has been supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), it is vital that members of Congress know that not all members of this Association agree with their position. The Rockefeller University Press is a member of the AAP, but we strongly oppose H.R. 3699.”

 *** FURTHER UPDATE: AN ONLINE PETITION TO TRY AND STOP THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT HAS BEEN SET UP HERE ***

Can AAP Members stay neutral in the row over the Research Works Act?

In the past couple of days I have reported on the decisions by MIT Press, ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press to distance themselves from the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699.

All three organisations are members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA, and has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, however, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring that all NIH-funded research is made freely accessible online, and it would prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the AAP has become the target for a lot  of criticism, with the research community calling on members of the association to disavow both the bill and AAP’s support for it. There have also been calls for AAP members to resign in protest.

However, it is not currently clear how representative the views of MIT Press, ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press are. In an attempt to find out I have over the past week or so contacted around 35 members of the AAP, primarily scholarly publishers. The majority of these organisations have yet to reply to my enquiry.

In contacting these organisations I asked the following three questions:

1.    Do you support the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy? If not, why not?

2.    Do you support the Research Works Act (RWA)? If not, why not

3.    If you do not support the RWA is it your intention to try to change AAP/PSP's public support of the Act (as outlined in its statement of 23rd December), or are you more likely to publicly disassociate yourself from AAP’s position, or even perhaps leave the AAP?

Of those who responded to me, the only organisation to answer all three questions directly (rather than issue a general statement) was the New England Journal of Medicine. The NEJM answered in this way:

1.    Dr. Drazen [NEJM editor-in-chief] was on the NIH Public Access working group, and our policies actually surpass the guidelines of the NIH Public Access Policy: All of our research content, regardless of funding source, is freely available six months after publication.

2.    We have no position on the RWA as drafted.

3.    We will continue to support AAP/PSP.

But is NEJM’s neutrality more representative of what AAP members feel about the RWA than the position taken by, say, MIT Press? One cannot know for sure, but it does seem likely (for the moment at least). Below, for instance, is the response I received from CrossRef:

“As a not-for-profit trade association of publishers CrossRef does not take positions on political matters. We have 1,300 very diverse members who range from large commercial publishers to small not-for-profits and they also include society publishers, government organisations, and university publishers. Our members hold a variety of opinions about open access and mandatory deposits of government funded research. We are intentionally business-model neutral. It is not part of our mission to lobby.”

CrossRef is right to point out that it is more difficult for an organisation to arrive at a consensus when its membership is diverse. Nevertheless, at least two university presses seem equally keen to remain neutral about AAP’s backing of the RWA. In response to my three questions, for instance, Oxford University Press (OUP) simply replied, "We cannot comment as we aren't taking a public position on this issue.”

Cambridge University Press (CUP), meanwhile, responded, “We have submitted a formal response to the Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), but we want that response to have time to be processed by OSTP and it is too early for us to make any public statements.”

For its part, Getty Publications appeared to be unaware of the RWA. “Thanks for your inquiry,” I was told by the Getty media relations department. “We passed it by our colleagues at Getty Publications, but they are unaware of the issue you raise.”

But whatever their current position, what remains to be seen is whether AAP members will be able to stay neutral in light of the growing pressure they face from the research community to overturn the AAP's support for the RWA. Is it really possible, as the president of the ACM Alain Chesnais clearly believes, for AAP members to stay neutral on legislation like the RWA when its own members/customers/users begin to criticise it for doing so?

Time will tell, but some maintain that it is in any case disingenuous to pretend that neutrality is possible. As OA advocate Peter Suber points out, AAP members who choose to sit on their hands on this issue are not abstaining, as they may claim. Rather they are sending out a clear message. This message, he says, reads, “We're undecided about RWA, or our members disagree about RWA, or we don't take stands on political issues, but we agree to pay dues to an organisation using our money and our name to work energetically against the interests of researchers and research.”

Clearly, some AAP members do actively support the RWA, and are highly unlikely to change their minds. But exactly how many that is we do not know. What we can say with certainty is that Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher in the world, does support the bill. Commenting on a blog post published by Public Library of Science co-founder Michael Eisen, Elsevier’s vice president and head of global corporate relations Tom Reller asserted, “Elsevier, along with other commercial and non-profit publishers do indeed support the Research Works Act and commend Congressman Issa and Congresswoman Maloney for co-sponsoring this important legislation.”

The problem is that many in the research community see things very differently. Some, like Peter Murray-Rust, a Reader in molecular informatics at the University of Cambridge, are not just critical of the AAP’s support for the RWA, but enraged by it. For that reason, Murray-Rust has written open letters to both OUP and CUP asking them to repudiate the bill.

He writes, “The AAP has proposed a bill which effectively legislates the restriction of access to scholarly publication with the sole intention of raising the income of publishers. I and many others feel this is unethical, immoral and unworthy of any organisation committed to the dissemination of knowledge. Some commentators have described it as an act of war by the publishing industry on the scholarly community.”

*** UPDATE: CUP EXPANDS ON ITS POSITION VIS-À-VIS THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT HERE ***

Pennsylvania State University Press says No to Research Works Act

Following the recent repudiations of the Research Works Act (RWA) by MIT Press and ITHAKA, I have now received an email from the director of Pennsylvania State University Press Patrick Alexander.

Like MIT Press and ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA.

Alexander writes: “Echoing our colleagues at MIT Press who recently commented on the Association of American Publishers’ endorsement of H.R. 3699, AAP’s statement does not reflect the position of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Nonetheless, our relationship with the AAP remains a vital aspect of our responsibility to share a role in the academic publishing community worldwide. Accordingly, we have no plans to sever that relationship.”

Pennsylvania State University Press is the third member of the AAP to publicly repudiate the RWA, notwithstanding the fact that the AAP supports the bill. When it was introduced in December, the AAP described the RWA as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, the RWA would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005 requiring that all NIH-funded research is made freely accessible online. The bill would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers. This would be a major blow to the Open Access movement.

What impact these public statements will have remains to be seen. All three of the above organisations have made it quite clear that they do not intend to resign from the AAP, which some researchers have been calling on members to do.

We should, however, note the comment posted earlier today on my blog by Gary Daught. Daught cites a statement that he says he received from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) today in which CLIR says, “We are opposed to the Research Works Act, the goals of which are, indeed, fundamentally in conflict with CLIR’s values, vision, and mission. Today we will draft a letter of withdrawal from AAP.”

I emailed CLIR myself on Wednesday asking for a comment on the RWA, but have yet to receive a reply.

I invite any member of AAP to send me their views on the RWA.

ITHAKA becomes the second AAP member to disavow the Research Works Act

Yesterday I reported that MIT Press has distanced itself from the Research Works Act (RWA). The RWA is a new bill introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year that would reverse the US National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring taxpayer-funded research to be made freely accessible online. It would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers.

The RWA is backed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and its Professional and Scholarly Division (PSP), which last December published a press release describing the bill as, “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, however, the bill would be a major setback for the Open Access movement. As I noted yesterday, AAP has therefore been widely criticised for its support of the RWA, and some in the research community have called on members of the association to disavow both the bill and AAP’s support for it. There have also been calls for AAP members to resign in protest.

Today I received an email from ITHAKA, the non-profit organisation dedicated to helping the academic community take full advantage of information and networking technologies, and which includes JSTOR, the online service providing access to archived academic journals, and Portico, the electronic-archiving Initiative.

The email was in response to an enquiry I made a few days ago asking ITHAKA to comment on the RWA, and AAP’s support for it. It contained the following statement:

“A core principle of our organisation is to provide the broadest possible access to scholarly works in ways that are sustainable and account for their long term preservation. We have no intention of endorsing RWA. We also have no intention of leaving the AAP. We do not agree with them on every issue, but we value our membership, as we do our participation in a number of library and scholarly associations.”

Commenting on the news, Open Access advocate Peter Suber said, “I applaud ITHAKA for distancing itself from the harmful Research Works Act. The AAP acts in the name of its members when it lobbies for the RWA, in effect recruiting all its members as allies in a cause that not all of them support. Through their public statements, MIT Press and ITHAKA have refused to lend their weight to a policy they do not endorse.”