CIHR scores Canadian first with open access policy for research publications

NSERC and SSHRC ponder next steps

Open access is coming to researchers funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) with the introduction of a new policy that puts pressure on Canada's other granting councils to follow suit. Beginning January 1/08, all CIHR grant recipients will be required to "make every effort" to make their peer-reviewed research articles available freely available within six months of publication.

The new policy brings Canada into line with nations that are leading the open access charge — namely the UK and US — and follows an earlier CIHR decision to make clinical trial data publicly available. It applies to research which is funded in whole or in part by CIHR and will be added to conditions for partnering with the granting agency.

"This is phase two. There's a changing philosophy happening around the world," says CIHR president Dr Alan Bernstein. "The advent of the web, like the advent of the print press, has transformed scientific publishing. Younger people get it".

Researchers have the option of making their publications freely available through the publisher's website or an online repository. These include PubMed Central — a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature managed by the US Institutes of Health's National Center for Biotechnology Information — and institutional repositories. The new requirements also apply to bioinformatics and atomic and molecular coordinate data.

More than 90% of peer-reviewed journals have some form of self-archiving and about 10% of peer-reviewed journals are now open access.

The decision to institute an open access policy follows the work of a CIHR task force which examined the issue under the leadership of Dr James Till of Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital, co-discover of stem cells and more recently a vocal proponent of open access.

compromises

CIHR's decision to implement a six month delay between publication and open access is considered one of several compromises to address the concerns of commercial journal publishers. They have resisted open access as a threat to their current business model of providing access only to those who pay for subscriptions. Researchers are also not required to abide by the new rules if the publisher does not grant its permission.

According to Bernstein , the rationale for embracing open access is simple.

"Research and science publicly funded by organizations like CIHR is public and therefore should be publicly available. Profits that arise from that publication should not interfere with its public availability," he says. "The technology is saying ‘why wait?' Publishers will have to change their business plans and some already have … The cost of journals is skyrocketing and becoming unaffordable."

Bernstein predicts that the six-month delay will shrink over time as the open access concept gathers momentum, adding that CIHR's policy could be extended to other areas of research in the future such as population data. He rejects the argument that open access could interfere with commercially promising intellectual property (IP).

"This provides six months more for the publisher and the private sector investor. If the IP in vulnerable, file a patent within six months," he says. "The biggest funder of the Structural Genomics Initiative (which is open access) is GlaxoSmithKline. The genome project was also entirely open and the data was put on the web in real time."

nserc & sshrc next?

With the CIHR open access policy now established, the pressure is on the other granting councils — the Natural Sciences and Engineering search Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) — to institute similar policies.

Bernstein says CIHR decided to go it alone but he has kept the other councils informed on CIHR's progress during regular meetings with the granting council presidents.

"There's a logic to doing it as a tri-council initiative but with the diversity of views in the academic community it would have gotten bogged down," he says. "We could not have reached a consensus but the other councils are interested."

SSHRC appears to be furthest advanced in embracing open access. Earlier this year, the social sciences and humanities (SSH) research communities received $25 million for two projects to provide digital content to SSH researchers and to develop a new, decentralized digital system for disseminating research results and enhancing researcher access (R$, February 26/07).

"There's strong support for open access in principle but deep concerns about how this will impact journals in the social sciences and humanities," says SSHRC senior policy advisor David Moorman. "Most are not-for-profit and very small, often being run off the edge of someone's desk ... There's no Pub Med Central or Elsevier in our community."

Moorman says SSHRC has had an open access policy since 2004. But it is not mandatory and such a move is not contemplated in the current environment. SSHRC currently supports 161 journals to improve the existing system, covering between 25-40% of annual operating costs. It is also in the process of revising its journals program to include open access journals.

"Open access journals were previously not eligible but we recently ran a limited competition for them providing one-year grants," he says. "We're in a period of massive transition for how communication occurs in our community. New business models are appearing rapidly ... As the environment evolves, a more comprehensive open access policy will occur."

At NSERC, a structured process has been established to examine open access and work is expected to take about one year, concluding in 2008.

"NSERC supports the principle of open access (and) our policy will be comprehensive. The challenge has been to find resources to address this policy issue and we're there now," says Denis Leclerc, NSERC's manager of policy and international relations. "A lot of media focus on access to scientific literature but we're also focused on data archiving ... One of the issues we will be examining is, what are the costs and who will bear them?"

Leclerc says no decision has been made on whether to strike a CIHR-style task force. If a task force mechanism is not employed, the agency may opt to utilize existing standing committees.

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