• Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

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13 January 2010The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and develop consensus recommendations for expanding public access to the journal articles arising from research funded by agencies of the United States government.

After recognizing the progress that has already been made in expanding access to scholarly literature, the Roundtable began its work by identifying a set of principles, shared across the full range of member perspectives, which should continue to inhere in scholarly publishing as it evolves. These principles are:

1) Peer review must continue its critical role in maintaining high quality and editorial integrity.
2) Adaptable business models will be necessary to sustain the enterprise in an evolving landscape.
3) Scholarly and scientific publications can and should be more broadly accessible with improved functionality
to a wider public and the research community.
4) Sustained archiving and preservation are essential complements to reliable publishing methods.
5) The results of research need to be published and maintained in ways that maximize the possibilities for
creative reuse and interoperation among sites that host them.

Roundtable participants’ shared commitment to these principles has led to the following consensus
recommendations.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The Roundtable’s core recommendation is:
Each federal research funding agency should expeditiously but carefully develop and implement an explicit public
access policy that brings about free public access to the results of the research that it funds as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer‐reviewed journal.

This public access objective can be accomplished in several ways: Some agencies may choose to develop and manage central databases; others may elect to work with university libraries, one or more publishers, or other external partners to establish centralized or distributed databases of journal articles resulting from the research they fund. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should lead the development and implementation of this multiagency program, which should be authorized in its fundamental properties and goals by regulation or
legislation. The program should develop common core properties that will promote interoperability across public
access databases. The program also should provide the flexibility necessary to accommodate agency‐specific needs and the capacity to evolve over time to accommodate the rapidly changing nature of scholarly publishing.

To implement this fundamental objective, the Roundtable proposes the following additional recommendations:
1) Agencies should work in full and open consultation with all stakeholders, as well as with OSTP, to develop
their public access policies.
2) Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access. An embargo period of between zero (for open access journals) and twelve months currently reflects such a balance for many science disciplines. For other fields a longer embargo period may be necessary.
3) Policies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability. OSTP should work with agencies to facilitate collaboration among them and between agencies and stakeholders to develop robust standards for the structure of full text and metadata, navigation tools, and other applications to achieve interoperability across the literature, taking international standards into account. OSTP should work with agencies that have cyberinfrastructure programs to develop a multiagency program supporting research and development to expand interoperability capability.
4) Every effort should be made to have the version of record (VoR) as the version to which free access is provided. If the VoR is not included in a public access database, the article version or reference that is included should contain links back to the VoR on the publisher’s site.
5) Government agencies should extend the reach of their public access policies through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders. To achieve the full potential of publicly accessible, interoperable databases, the multiagency public access program recommended here should be extended through voluntary collaborations with publishers, universities, and other entities husbanding the results of research, within and beyond the U.S.
6) Policies should foster innovation in the research and educational use of scholarly publications.
7) Government public access policies should address the need to resolve the challenges of long‐term digital preservation.
8) OSTP should establish a public access advisory committee. To provide a mechanism for periodic assessment of the rapidly changing scholarly publishing landscape, and to provide a forum for discussion of adjustments to agency public access policies in the context of that changing landscape, OSTP should establish an advisory committee to provide a periodic, independent evaluation of agencies’ public access policies and practices.