
ACM signed letter opposing open access - beefhash
https://newsroom.publishers.org/researchers-and-publishers-oppose-immediate-free-distribution-of-peer-reviewed-journal-articles
======
hugofirth
I've said this before on other threads but frankly, scientific publishers
represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money:

\- Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries)
do the work for free.

\- They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free.

\- They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy
editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds.

\- Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money)
are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done
well this is extremely time consuming.

\- Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who
produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and
Open Access fees.

\- Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work. Not that
it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access.

The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this
system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.

I like to hope the ACM and other signatories will face a backlash for this.
But they most likely wont

~~~
anjc
If your issue is that tax payer money is being stolen then presumably open
access should only be granted to citizens of a country, for research arising
from academic institutions in that country? Otherwise countries will similarly
be stealing tax payer money from one another. Actually, do public libraries
get access to Elsevier etc?

~~~
vincent-toups
The presumption you're making is that a country would never spend money for
the public good, where that is defined to include the entire human race,
rather than just nationals.

Weird assumption! Generally speaking, academic research is considered to be an
international, or super-national, cooperative effort in most fields.

~~~
anjc
I don't make this assumption. I simply think OPs argument that research should
be open because tax payers have funded it is weak, for the reason I stated,
i.e. it implies that non-tax payers should not have access, or conversely,
implies that taxpayers in each country should get to decide how this research
is distributed, possibly restricting access to non-nationals.

> The presumption you're making is that a country would never spend money for
> the public good, where that is defined to include the entire human race,
> rather than just nationals.

I think in general this is the case? Obviously governments budget for foreign
aid, and also contribute to collective efforts e.g. climate change or
(relevant to this discussion) EU funds such as Horizon 2020. But I don't think
any governments do/should consider "the public" as meaning "the entire human
race".

~~~
travisporter
1\. A->B does not imply !A->!B 2\. Government foreign aid is a counterexample

~~~
anjc
I don't know what's meant to be A and B here. I already listed foreign aid as
a counterexample in the post you're replying to.

------
gwicks56
My wife is a scientist who has peer reviewed hundreds of articles. She has
never been paid a dime. Worse, she is forced to pirate articles published in
the same journals she is publishing in and reviews articles for, because she
can't afford them and her University does not pay for them. So when they say:
```Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce``` they are not lying, they
are just forgetting to mention who covers most of that cost, for FREE!

~~~
hos234
Amazon pulls in thousands of unpaid reviews for any product. Now what do you
do? Give all of them the product free?

Lets say 3 in 100 reviews are good. And you want those 3 to come back and
review the next product. You are even willing to pay them something. Is there
a guarantee that they have interest and will show up, and if they do, is there
a guarantee that they produce a useful review of the same standard the second
time around?

Thats just one simplified reason about the dynamics of this process, that is
going to block everyone from getting things for free.

Its easy to react, to push to dismantle it and you just end up with YouTube
style mega mass of comments under every vid where the best comments are
guaranteed to get buried unless they pander to the will of the herd.

~~~
mschuetz
Reviewing an amazon article costs 5 minutes. Reviewing a paper costs a day.

Journals extort hundreds of man hours per conference from reviewers. The
largest cost of all, research and writing the paper, isn't reimbursed in the
slightest and largely covered by tax payers, who then still won't be able to
access the results because of paywalls.

The entire business plan of journals is to take research and peer review for
free, and then sell it. Back when distribution was costly that may have made
sense, but nowadays with the internet the cost of distribution is a fraction
of what it used to be.

~~~
hos234
Cost of distribution maybe free but attracting qualified and useful reviews is
definitely not.

People who think open access is the solution to that are dealing with a
focusing illusion - [https://www.edge.org/response-
detail/11984](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984)

~~~
necovek
You seem to repeatedly ignore people claiming that they _are_ doing peer-
reviews for free. I guess free facts are not qualified and useful facts ;)

------
jillesvangurp
I peer reviewed lots of articles when I was a researcher, including for IEEE
and ACM publications. Peer reviews, editorial work, authoring articles, etc.
are all part of academic life, much of which is publicly funded and benefits
society.

I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews. This
is not a thing. Journal editors probably get payed in some cases but mostly
this is a thing that is part of their professional responsibilities as e.g. a
university professor and also something that looks good on their CVs and gives
them influence and power. Actual labor related to proof reading, typesetting,
etc. is uncommon except for some high profile publications. Mostly this work
is done by authors themselves. I've dealt with professional proof readers only
on two occasions.

Cost related to distribution of scientific work is almost exclusively related
to the printing process, which for the past 25 years has technically been
completely redundant. As soon as the WWW emerged in the early nineties,
scientist started distributing articles in digital form. I know, because this
is when I started doing research. I think that over the course of my research
career, I've only visited the library twice. Once to get a copy of some
journal article by a publisher that just was just super anal about online
articles and once to drop off a box of thesis copies (a requirement of the
university at the time). Even before Google became a thing, finding articles
online was easy.

Considering the ACM is an organization that claims to act in the interest of
it's members (i.e. researchers), open access should be a foregone conclusion
and completely and utterly uncontroversial. The fact that this is not the
case, tells me it is prioritizing other interests and not acting in good faith
on behalf of its own members who would be do well to make continued membership
conditional on this getting resolved ASAP. Money talks and members walking
away would fix this in no time. Online publication is cheap (not free
obviously) and should be easily funded from membership fees.

~~~
chrisseaton
> I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews.
> This is not a thing.

You are paid for it because if you're a paid researcher then it's part of your
paid day-to-day job, in your job description.

~~~
peterkelly
Right, but those costs are paid by the university and/or the taxpayer (in the
case of publicly funded research) - they are _not_ paid by the publishers. The
latter effectively treat academics as free labour from which they can profit.

------
sgentle
"publishers across America make significant investments, at no cost to
taxpayers" is an interesting claim. As I understand it, the majority of
journal subscription revenue is from libraries and universities. Are they not
taxpayer-funded?

I'd also be interested to know the reasoning behind "this cost shift would
place billions of dollars of new and additional burden on taxpayers". Is that
because universities will have to organise their own peer review instead of
paying for journals to do it for them? Surely, if organising peer review is so
valuable, the universities will happily pay for it, and the almighty market
(hallowed be its name) will return those billions of dollars to their rightful
owners.

Broadly, I think this argument is worth reading with an eye to what it doesn't
say, rather than what it does. It's big on lofty appeals to "government
intervention in the private market", and fastidious about mentioning the
"billions of dollars" that flow through journal publishers, yet mysteriously
waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange.

~~~
fruffy
>yet mysteriously waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange

I honestly cannot really think of one. For example, conferences organized by
ACM still cost an enormous amount of money to just attend and largely break
even by accepting company donations. The grants there are also largely
provided by companies.

------
tasogare
Yesterday I had to deal with copyright to have a conference paper published by
ACM. Open Access was charged 700/900$ based on my membership. The two others
options was transferring all the management rights (keep dreaming), or giving
them a license that basically allow them to do whatever they want anyway. I
took the last option but I was angry: this is basically blackmailing me
against my carrer path to get my work for free and make money on it. And I had
to do all the bullshit job of dealing with templating, which should be done by
the publisher.

Hopefully my personal page is well indexed in Google Scholar when searching
for my name, so anyone can get my articles for free.

~~~
qpiox
@tasogare If you are an ACM member, you can use the Authorizer service to
enable free access to your papers. The service creates a special link that you
can use on two web-sites - for example your institutional web-site and your
personal web-site, so that visitors to your web-site, will be redirected to
PDF download of your papers.

This effectively allows open-access to your papers, as long as you have a web-
site.

~~~
tasogare
I’m not. And after that I don’t plan to be one. From what I understand they
"grant" me the rights to publish my preprint paper on my website. Which I
planned to do anyway. As a UE citizen living in Asia I would have done so
anyway, good luck for them suing me over my own work in a foreign
jurisdiction.

------
justinclift
It looks like the ACM General Elections are coming up, with several officers
and various other positions being available:

[https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-
council/2020-slate](https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate)

It's likely worth someone contacting each of the nominees to publish info on
where they stand on the Open Access issue.

With that, the general ACM members who vote should have a decent ability to
affect the ACM's future directions on this issue. :)

That is assuming not 100% of all nominated people are against Open Access.
Could be a bad assumption though. :(

~~~
qpiox
Due to ACM protecting American business interests in cases such as this, as a
member I give priority to people not from USA and if there is a choice, people
not from EU.

Most researchers from USA and EU do not understand that $15 per paper for
reader access is way too much, that $99 for professional access is way too
much, that SIG groups should not organize events in USA only, and when they
organize event they should choose places that well connected to most of the
world, and that do not have too strict visa requirements for researchers
visits to scientific events.

~~~
kick
To be fair to the ACM, they _do_ have cheaper rates in developing countries:
$99 won't apply to you if you're outside of North America or Europe.

Still a profiteering organization, but they've thought this out a little.

------
kick
The ACM is a parasite of an organization.

If you want to be in one of the clubs that badly, support the IEEE instead.
Friendlier, cheaper, and _not_ controlled by lawyers.

The ACM has a lot of cool people, and a few nice resources, but it's not worth
supporting the profiteering it does.

~~~
acd
I totally disagree if you get a membership which is affordable at $99 per year
you get access to lots of good learning material. That includes computer books
from O'reilly and courses from Skillsoft.

Portal [https://learning.acm.org/](https://learning.acm.org/)

~~~
kick
That doesn't give you access to the Digital Library, which is the part of this
that's relevant to the article, and it doesn't change the other arguments
given.

~~~
shinryuu
Still, if you compare getting O'Reilly membership by itself it would be
cheaper to get the ACM membership

~~~
pfranz
My public library offers O'Reilly digital access. Unfortunately, it was some
limited subset of what O'Reilly's own subscription service offers. How does
ACM compare?

------
a_bonobo
These are the dying throes of a industry that knows its days are numbered.

In biology, we now have biorxiv - arxiv but for biology papers - and the
growth of papers there has been exponential (source:
[https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/11922084840136744...](https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/1192208484013674496/photo/1)
) Biorxiv is free, not peer reviewed, and accepts any format the paper is in
(except reviews and rebuttals IIRC).

IMHO: Papers posted to biorxiv are, currently, of higher quality than what you
get as a peer reviewer from journals, because authors rely a little bit on the
peer review process to clear up any remaining problems. Sometimes this
actually happens. Once people are getting used to biorxiv, we'll see more low
quality stuff getting submitted there, but still - biorxiv has shown us that
in the Internet age, biology doesn't really need journals.

HOWEVER funding bodies, universities, people who have to judge your scientific
work still rely on the stamp of journals 100%. My current employer wants us to
submit at least 5 papers per year in the top 10% impact factor (IF) journals
of our field. If we get into a really large IF journal (Nature, Science), we
get a small financial bonus. Universities are, in turn, judged based on in how
many high-IF journals they publish (think uni rankings). The higher the
ranking, the easier it is to advertise to students, the more money you get in
fees.

As long as these people can't find a different measurement for quality of
scientific work we're stuck with journals - but once we have a different
measurement, we can toss journals out the window immediately.

------
denzil_correa
I have been a reviewer for (Computer Science) journals of publications like -
Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, AAAI and ACM. The reviewer doesn't receive any money
for reviews. The editing is entirely taken care by the authors of the paper.

------
hyperion2010
Personally I cannot wait for the dissolution of the modern publishing
industry. HN might find it of interest that many large academic publishers are
trying to pivot to providing a variety of data management services to
universities. The academics thus far have not been fooled, but we will see how
the politics plays out.

------
mpiedrav
For any department/institution that wants to run its own journal, there's the
Open Journal System [1]. They also develop the Open Conference System [2].

I used to be a sysadmin for a research institute using them. Both OJS and OCS
performed reasonably well back then.

Technical options to systematically counteract predatory publishing like ACM
and Elsevier [3] do exist. However, it requires plenty of institutional
commitment and overcoming political opposition, as it boils down to enhancing
researcher reputation in an effective way.

Building reputation almost from scratch vs. depending on established, well
recognized publishers is kind of the perpetual FOSS vs. proprietary software
conflict.

[1] [https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/](https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/)

[2] [https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/](https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge)

------
choeger
> Going below the current 12 month ‘embargo’ would make it very difficult for
> most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles.

Then just stop doing it. If science needs publishers, scientists will soon
notice. If not, well, good riddance!

Frankly, ACM just kills it's own value proposition. You publish with ACM, or
IEEE et. al., because they propose greater reach. If scientists realize that
noone pays the ridiculous amounts of money and usually go to archive.org
instead, they will soon realize that they don't need ACM for publishing.

Soon after, free, or very cheap, open access journals and collections will be
the go-to default. If the traditional publishers have any more value to add
than a searchable catalog and a barely functioning citation index, they will
compete. But I doubt it.

~~~
qpiox
You are forgetting that as a researcher you are evaluated by your own
university based on where you publish. And no university will suddenly start
to recognize some obscure publication venues, in fact what they will do is
issue a policy that such papers will not be taken into account during
evalution period.

Otherwise, I would claim that my personal web-site or my colleagues personal
web-site is a scientific publisher and would publish my papers only there.

There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected
publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers
no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply
do not have a choice.

~~~
jwally
Are there prohibitions to publish in multiple publications?

~~~
PeterisP
Yes, pretty much every serious venue is considering only papers with novel,
unpublished research, so if you've published "that thing" already somewhere
else then that disqualifies you from getting a well-ranked publication out of
that piece of research, and it's strong disincentive to publish anything
outside of the venues that 'count' for the purposes of evaluating you or your
project goals.

------
Jerry2
Well, I guess 2019 is going to be the last year of my paid membership. I've
been a member for the past 15 years. I'll send my membership dues to Sci-Hub
instead.

------
oefrha
> Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce.

Yeah, they are not free to produce, but they can cost as little as $10 per
submission. See _Discrete Analysis_ [1], for instance. Here’s Tim Gowers’
announcement from 2015 going into the economic details.[2]

[1]
[https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/](https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/)

[2] [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-
an...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-
overlay-journal/)

------
erpellan
The scientific publishing industry is a racket. It’s defending a pricing model
that was steep when all journals had to be typeset and printed. Now it’s
inexcusable.

All Open Access does is shift the cost to the authors of the paper (usually as
an explicit portion of the funding grant). The publishers still get paid! They
just can’t keep charging over and over for the same PDF. Of course they’re
going to whine and moan.

~~~
plmu
Indeed, but the ACM is not (purely) a publisher. It should represent the
interests of its members instead of betraying them.

~~~
qpiox
Next time vote for persons who are not working in USA and who are not voting
in EU and other wealthy countries. The rest are not so well funded, so they
should know better.

------
jdkee
“Information wants to be free.”

The iconic phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand,[1] who, in the late 1960s,
founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating
rather than oppressing.[2] The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression
was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve Wozniak:[3]

From Wikipedia.

------
qpiox
I am an ACM member and I am not American, and I was not asked if I agree with
this. I feel this is an abuse of power by the ACM leadership and will speak
against this internally.

But, as I mentioned in another post, ACM allows it's members to use their
Authorizer service to allow access to their own papers for free via their
institutional or personal web-sites. This means that papers will be in-a-way
openly accessible, but not via the ACM Digital Library - as a visitor you
should try to go to the authors website and see if there is a free link to
download the paper.

------
suyash
Long live arXiv.org, paid publications should be totally disrupted in 2020.

~~~
mschuetz
arXiv is a nice idea but I kinda hate it. It's not compatible with overleaf
for no good reason at all. arXiv expects you to ship the source of the article
+ some sort of generated bib file of a specific version, instead of generating
the bib file from the source. As a result, arXiv will fail to host overleaf
generated content if both happen to use different versions of tex at the time.
But I'm submitting the entire source to arXiv, so there is no good reason for
arXiv to fail to produce a pdf from it!

Gave up on arXiv because of that. I use overleaf to avoid all the Latex
issues, and I'm absolutely not interested in supporting something that expects
me to get back to wasting time on fixing latex issues instead of producing
content.

~~~
abhgh
Just delete the _.bib file. arXiv only needs the_.bbl file. What is confusing
is even if you have both the _.bib and_.bbl, arXiv doesn't ignore the former,
it raises an error anyway. Bad error reporting.

Another tip if you're using overleaf: make sure your bibliography related
warnings that overleaf points out, are gone too. Overleaf is resilient to
these but arXiv is not.

~~~
mschuetz
I think the bbl file is what I meant. It's created from the source and bib
file, and arXiv refuses to accept the one that is created by overleaf. I
really dislike arXiv for demanding the full source and refusing pdfs, but then
insisting you also provide a file that is generated from that source, but not
accepting that file unless it's generated with specific builders.

~~~
abhgh
Oh that's surprising. I uploaded content generated by overleaf (they provide a
arXiv compatible dump of your project) a month or so ago and it worked
smoothly (after uploading to arXiv I deleted the bib file of course).

~~~
mschuetz
I tried about a year ago and about half a year ago, respectively. Both times,
the exported bbl file hat a different version than the one accepted by arXiv.
First time, the bbl version was too old. Second time, the bbl version was too
new. First time, I ended up printing the latex generated pdf file so that
arXiv wouldn't recognize it as a Latex produced file. That kinda sucked
because in the printed pdf, you couldn't select text or access references.
Second time that didn't work anymore because arXiv added a check to prevent
users from uploading printed pdfs. I ended up simply hosting it at our
institute page and abandoning arXiv.

------
sideshowb
Journals get away with extortionate fees because tenure committees, interview
panels etc take journal quality as a proxy for research quality when
evaluating a candidate.

If they stopped doing that it would certainly reduce the incentive to submit
research to the more expensive journals.

------
fulldecent2
As soon as I saw American Heart Association on the list I knew it was going to
be a scam idea. This "non-profit" pays their CEO $1.5M, just fired all their
product distributors to bring profit home, and just squeezed all their
independent training centers by tripling the price of supplies to them.
Lastly, they plant "volunteers" into its customers. For example, the
purchasing manager for Veterans Affairs in charge of buying all CPR training
for the world's largest health system is also in a leadership position with
AHA. Guess who has the exclusive, non-competitive contract?

When anti net neutrality was up for debate, same thing. I just needed to tell
grandmom: it's a political thing Comcast is fighting for. Grandmom replies "if
Comcast wants it it must be bad". Bam! Done explaining.

------
dredmorbius
Is there any comparable list of organisations which have _supported_ this
measure?

Though the list of signatories to this particular letter is extraordinarily
disheartening.

I'd written a brief bit a few years ago, "What the academic publishing
industry calls "theft" the world calls 'research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular"

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/)

Among other points, it includes cites from notable academics (NYU's Graduate
Center president Chase Robinson, and Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz)
making the case for information as a public good.

------
linuxhansl
Of course... Money over free flow of scientific information.

How is this possible? Much of this research is - at least partially - tax
funded. And then publishing corporations skim money from the distribution of
the information providing little or no value. In my book that perfectly meets
the definition of a parasite.

Perhaps I am missing something.

------
vzaliva
I am an ACM member and I see many other members like me disappointed by the
stance ACM took. What is the best way to get our grievances known? Thousands
comments across various forums are lost in information noise. If there is a
petition or an open letter we can sign?

~~~
kps
[https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-
council/2020-slate](https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate)

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> This mandate already amounts to a significant government intervention in
the private market.

This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the
private market" seems to be treated as _de facto_ harmful.

The "mandate" refers to "a legacy regulation that is still in force today"
under which "proprietary journal articles that report on federally funded
research must be made available for free within 12 months of publication".

~~~
a3n
> This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the
> private market" seems to be treated as de facto harmful.

The current administration and Senate is the target of that sentence.

------
awalton
Well of course they did. The business model for the established journals is
gatekeeping knowledge, so why would they be for open science?

------
rasz
Reminds me of CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association),
organizers of the biggest trade show for manufacturers of Cellphone service
equipment, coming out against right to repair in 2017 during Nebraska state
hearing.

------
xorand
As I said many times, the organizations which support the publishers is the
problem. Lots of money go to publishers pockets because academic management
support them.

------
jl2718
Their arguments would be convincing if their peer review processes actually
worked to guarantee the integrity of their published results.

------
jwally
Honest question: what is the benefit of publishing in a peer reviewed journal
vs something like Wikipedia?

~~~
cardiffspaceman
Wikipedia will reject "original research". That phrase would completely apply,
without scare quotes, to articles that need peer review. You could always use
a blogging platform?

------
smkellat
What a farrago of lies and deceit this is! Calling Open Access a “legacy
regulation” is a rather excessive bit of lying. These journals depend very
much on tax dollars which is why every library that drops them destroys their
bottom line and the base of individual subscribers (teaching faculty)
generally don’t pay for their subscriptions themselves.

Frankly in reading this I was just shocked to see the Trump administration
accused of possibly taking steps forward that the Obama administration did
not/would not. We should only be paying for research once. Paying publishers
repeatedly for access to somebody else’s work isn’t right in this age of
competing budget priorities.

~~~
klyrs
If I wanted to kill open access in today's political environment, I'd frame it
as communism/socialism vs. big business/tax dollars and lobby Trump on that
basis, and goad him with some anti-Obama trash talk. At first blush it sounds
difficult to get Trump to care about this apparent ivory-tower issue, but in
that framing, he might just care enough to act. It's a sorry state of affairs
that the president is so predictably shallow.

------
buboard
trying hard to sympathize with this letter

So , a bunch of societies publish journals which rely on closed access and
library subscription fees to survive. They are afraid to start charging for
the open access fees, because they know that authors will prefer to publishing
in other, better known open access journals instead. So they attempt to lobby
Trump using the sleaziest of pretenses, appealing to his "america first"
sensitivities. They also misrepresent themselves as they don't operate in an
open private marketplace, since library subscriptions are practically
mandatory and paid by the state in most of europe and much of US. They don't
produce the intellectual property they describe either - the original authors
do and also hold copyrights to it. Plus they publish a ton of submissions from
foreign countries so, what are they talking about? So ... these guys should
look up "streisand effect"

It is inevitable that mandatory open access will lead to consolidation to a
few open access libraries. That's both good and bad , but significantly more
good

------
boulos
The letter isn't that long, and I find the press release less useful than the
full text. It's also signed by many more publishers than just the ACM.

> Dear President Trump:

> The undersigned organizations represent the leading publishers and non-
> profit scientific societies in the United States. We write to you with deep
> concern regarding a proposed policy that has come to our attention that
> would jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged
> in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles
> and would potentially delay the publication of new research results. The
> role of the publisher is to advance scholarship and innovation, fostering
> the American leadership in science that drives our economy and global
> competitiveness. As copyrighted works, peer-reviewed journal articles are
> licensed to users in hundreds of foreign countries, supporting billions of
> dollars in U.S. exports and an extensive network of American businesses and
> jobs. In producing and disseminating these articles, we make ongoing
> competitive investments to support the scientific and technical communities
> that we serve.

> As noted above, we have learned that the Administration may be preparing to
> step into the private marketplace and force the immediate free distribution
> of journal articles financed and published by organizations in the private
> sector, including many non-profits. This would effectively nationalize the
> valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give
> it away to the rest of the world for free. This risks reducing exports and
> negating many of the intellectual property protections the Administration
> has negotiated with our trading partners.

> We write to express our strong opposition to this proposal, but in doing so
> we want to underscore that publishers make no claims to research data
> resulting from federal funding.

> To be clear, publishers both support and enable “open access” business
> models and “open data” as important options within a larger framework that
> assumes critical publisher investments remain viable. Under a legacy
> regulation that is still in force today, proprietary journal articles that
> report on federally funded research must be made available for free within
> 12 months of publication. This mandate already amounts to a significant
> government intervention in the private market. Going below the current 12
> month “embargo” would make it very difficult for most American publishers to
> invest in publishing these articles. As a consequence, it would place
> increased financial responsibility on the government through diverted
> federal research grant funds or additional monies to underwrite the
> important value added by publishing.

> In the coming years, this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new
> and additional burden on taxpayers. In the process, such a policy would
> undermine American jobs, exports, innovation, and intellectual property. It
> could also result in some scientific societies being forced to close their
> doors or to no longer be able to support the publication of U.S.-sponsored
> science that is key to ensuring that the U.S. remains the world leader in
> science and technology.

> In addition to financing and managing a world-leading peer review process,
> publishers make extensive investments in education, research, and innovative
> digital platforms that advance American competitiveness and help ensure the
> quality and integrity of American science. Undermining the marketplace is
> unnecessary, counterproductive, and would significantly harm the system of
> peer-reviewed scholarly communication that fuels America’s leadership in
> research and innovation.

> We urge you to oppose this proposed policy, and we look forward to working
> with the Administration on this matter.

