Open letter to the WHOSTP and Subcommittee on Open Science

To the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Subcommittee on Open Science,

We wholeheartedly applaud your recent memorandum ensuring free, immediate and equitable access to federally funded scholarship. Your leadership on this issue makes a brighter future possible, but there are significant risks if care is not taken in the implementation. Specifically, if the implementation of this policy reinforces the move towards expensive article processing charges (APCs) and “transformative agreements” (TAs) where institutions pay those charges directly, innovation will be hampered by restricting research dissemination to only individuals or institutions with large or dedicated publishing budgets. The risk is that this memorandum will improve equitable access at the cost of making participation in research less equitable, which could be devastating to research progress.

The dominance of the USA in research means that its policies have the potential to set the standard for the world. If agencies implement this memorandum by paying APCs for federally funded research, many journals will be forced by financial considerations to switch to an APC-only model. This will exclude all scholars who are not federally funded, in the USA and worldwide, undermining the ambition of the memo for the USA to be a “critical leader and partner on issues of open science around the world”. Our current system of publishing requires substantial financing either to access or to participate in research, and so without fundamental changes it cannot give us a future in which both of these activities are equitable. Private and non-profit organizations can play an important role, competing in creating services that go beyond the essential processes of making the content available and managing peer review. However, these essential services are a core part of what defines scholarship, and access to these must be equitable.

The USA has the power to fundamentally change the landscape of scholarly publishing and make both access and participation equitable. It can do this in the short term by requiring that research is only published in venues where the ability to pay (an APC or TA) is not required for making the results immediately available. There is no doubt that this would disrupt the publishing industry, but there are successful journals that run on this model, and it would force publishers to compete on added value rather than by artificially limiting the ability to access and meaningfully participate in scholarship. To ensure innovation for the long term, the USA can provide an infrastructure that will lay the foundations for a flourishing ecosystem of new approaches to scholarly publishing. An open publishing infrastructure which allows third parties to re-use and build on scholarly content and data will boost progress in exactly the same way that public infrastructure boosts the economy.

Make publishing equally affordable for everyone.
Recommendation 1. Urgently clarify that equitable access to the results of federally funded scholarship must not be at the cost of losing equitable participation in scholarship.
The memorandum states the Subcommittee on Open Science will “consider measures to reduce inequities in publishing of … federally funded research and data”, but a dominant APC/TA-only model of publishing would create new financial barriers for non-federally funded research.
Allow everyone to use the results of all scholarship.
Recommendation 2. Mandate that federally funded scholarship must include a license that allows for re-use, and be published in venues that allow this for all research, regardless of funding.
The memorandum states that the Subcommittee on Open Science will “develop strategies to make federally funded … research … findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable” but this is not something that publishers will agree to without such a mandate. Without extending this possibility to all research, the memorandum could lead to a two-tier system in which federally funded research can be published in upper tier journals and non-federally funded research only in lower tier journals, which would hurt progress for all research, including federally funded research.
Build a modern publishing infrastructure, freely available for all.
Recommendation 3. Build, or fund the scholarly community to build a unified and freely accessible infrastructure for publishing content.
This infrastructure should be independent of existing publishers, should meet the accessibility requirements of the memorandum, and should be designed according to a single cross-agency standard to foster third party innovation in services and models of publishing running on top of this infrastructure.

Beyond equitable access, the implementation of these recommendations will accelerate progress by dramatically improving the way we do research. Currently, significant research time and federal funding is diverted to the antiquated and inefficient publishing infrastructure. Researchers are obliged to use this outdated infrastructure because of the perceived necessity to publish in certain journals for career advancement, the lack of innovation in these journals, and the fact that most data remains inaccessible in practice. An open, flexible infrastructure would lead to a wealth of new and innovative approaches that would not only reduce inefficiency, but hugely widen the scope of what is possible.

In summary, we are excited by the possibilities opened up for scholarship by this memorandum. We urge you to promote approaches that maximally encourage participation and innovation by making all data easily and conveniently accessible with a unified approach that is open to all. Investing now in equitable, open infrastructure could allow America to lead the world into a new golden age for research.

Signed,

Peter Norvig Stanford University Professor (or other Faculty)
Melanie Mitchell Santa Fe Institute Professor (or other Faculty)
Ila Fiete MIT Professor (or other Faculty)
Scott Joel Aaronson University of Texas at Austin Professor (or other Faculty)
Bradley Roberts Wellcome Trust Nonprofit
Karel Svoboda Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics Nonprofit
Daniel M Wolpert Columbia University Professor (or other Faculty)
Anthony Zador Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor (or other Faculty)
Yann LeCun New York University Professor (or other Faculty)
Ashley Farley Gates Foundation Nonprofit
Michael Eisen University of California Berkeley Professor (or other Faculty) Also Editor-in-Chief of eLife.
Timothy Behrens University of Oxford, University College London Professor (or other Faculty)
Gary Marcus NYU Professor Emeritus
Philip N Cohen University of Maryland Professor (or other Faculty) Director of SocArXiv
Kathleen Fitzpatrick Michigan State University Professor (or other Faculty) Project Director, Humanities Commons
Peter Suber Harvard University Senior Advisor on Open Access
Kathleen Shearer COAR Nonprofit
Gina Turrigiano Brandeis University Professor (or other Faculty)
Susan Murray African Journals Online Nonprofit
Chris Bourg MIT Director of Libraries
Peter Murray-Rust University of Cambridge Professor (or other Faculty) The world is facing major challenges (climate, health, food, etc.) where equitable scientific knowledge can make a major contribution.
Alex Holcombe University of Sydney Professor (or other Faculty) The government should support the many emerging alternatives to expensive journal publishing, such as open-source journal management systems, preprint servers, and websites dedicated to curation and peer review.
See all 1478 signatures from over 34 countries and 260 universities (updates hourly)

This open letter was written by a number of authors and coordinated by Neuromatch.

Contact us:
ostp-letter@neuromatch.io

 

Note that this letter has had a few minor revisions that do not change the sense but make it clearer and more inclusive. In the interests of transparency, this letter has been openly stored on GitHub and the full edit history can be viewed. Each signature in the full list has a timestamp that can be used to verify the precise version of the letter that was signed.

 

 

Contact us:
ostp-letter@neuromatch.io

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