ACS Position Statement

Statement on Ensuring Public Access to High Quality Science

ACS Statement on Ensuring Public Access to High Quality Science

Summary

The ACS Statement on Ensuring Public Access to High Quality Science opposes government policy to provide free access publishing for all federally funded research, supports 2005 NIH public access policy experiment and encouraged proper analysis before further steps are taken.

ACS Position

The American Chemical Society, along with numerous other scientific societies, opposes new federal policies that would jeopardize the quality of science by mandating free dissemination of journal articles based on federal funding only six months after publication. ACS is concerned that such policies would undermine the peer-review process that ensures scientific quality and impose substantial new costs to agencies that would come at the expense of research funding.

ACS believes that the National Institutes of Health struck a reasonable balance with its 2005 public-access policy— which provides free access to articles within 12 months of publication—and we support and aim to facilitate author participation in this effort. Ensuring public access to research stemming from government (or any other) funding is essential to scientific progress and intrinsic to the mission of ACS. ACS has long been a leader in providing high-quality, high-impact, scientific journals as well as innovative digital delivery systems that ensure access to research is wider and faster than ever before.

Today, public access to quality scientific research is possible through substantial federal funding of the conduct of research and substantial private funding of its verification and dissemination. The verification process, commonly called peer review, is indispensable to maintaining scientific quality. The staff, capital and operational costs of managing the peer review system and its thousands of expert reviewers and editors are considerable. Currently, publishers recover these costs mainly through journal subscription charges to university, industry, and other users.

Legislation that would mandate free dissemination of peer-reviewed journal manuscripts based on federal funding just six months after publication would undermine the very system that validates and ensures the quality of all research, including federal research. Since generally more than 70 percent of a scientific journal article’s usage occurs after six months, such policies would clearly reduce journal subscriptions by effectively giving away the peer-review service in which publishers invest to guarantee the quality and integrity of scientific research.

The current debate about mandating free access after six months to NIH or other federally-supported research must be informed by an objective, independent analysis of the long-term implications. Such an analysis must include a careful assessment of the national need proponents seek to address, the impact on scientific quality, the long-term cost to the federal government, and possible non-federal alternatives. Rather than mandate separate distribution systems for federal and non-federal research, ACS and other publishers seek to work with agencies on alternatives to improve access to all research.

At a time of large budget deficits, policymakers must consider the long-term cost of all research agencies developing, procuring, and managing major new electronic database systems, which would unnecessarily duplicate the efforts of publishers. Moreover, mandating free access within six months ultimately would shift the costs of peer review back to authors and federal agencies—forcing taxpayers to pay for the verification and publishing of research in addition to its conduct. Agencies would be forced to cover these new dissemination costs by shifting funding from actual research.

Finally, policymakers must consider the extent to which new mandates would erode the ability of non-profit scientific societies to provide career, educational and other vital services to the scientific community and the public. Thus, ACS urges careful consideration of the long-term implications of new federal mandates to ensure that policymakers do not impede the very scientific discovery they seek to advance.