Bipartisan Bill for Public Access to Research—Time for Action

T he " red " versus " blue " state divide, most graphically captured in mapped results of the infamous United States presidential election battle between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000, has come to symbolize the political polarization of America. It may be surprising, therefore, to fi nd a Republican from President Bush's decidedly red state of Texas and Gore's running mate, a Democrat from the blue state of Connecticut, agreeing on anything. Yet just such a pair has recently recognized that one issue, at least, rises above partisan forces: open access to publicly funded research. Senators John Cornyn (Texas) and Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut) have introduced a bill whereby federal agencies with research expenditure over US$100 million per year must ensure that research articles produced from their grants are deposited in an Internet-accessible public archive within six months of acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal. The bill, called the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S.2695) (FRPAA), explains its rationale: " Congress fi nds that the Federal Government funds basic and applied research with the expectation that new ideas and discoveries that result from the research, if shared and effectively disseminated, will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and around the world " [1]. And, no doubt gratifying to the bill's sponsors, a recent Harris poll shows that the American public is overwhelmingly in support of public access to federally funded research [2]. Last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) instituted a policy recommending, but not requiring, its grantees to deposit their research articles into its archive, PubMed Central, within one year of acceptance for publication [3]. One year later, compliance remains low, perhaps not surprising given the voluntary nature of this process and the opposition expressed to it by many publishers. When the NIH was fi rst called on to consider its policies on access to research—a result of direct recommendations from Congressional appropriators—several publishing organizations lobbied hard against the NIH's efforts. Those groups are taking the same tack with this new legislation, presenting doomsday scenarios that predict public access will undermine the very peer-review process that supports scientifi c progress. And yet the evidence from publishers who have moved voluntarily in the direction outlined by the FRPAA is entirely contrary to these doomsayers. Incentives to subscribe to such journals will remain—by virtue of the six-month delay in …