The NIH mandate — we're not in Kansas any more

Since the last issue of Learned Publishing, legislation has been enacted in the United States requiring authors funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their accepted research articles publicly available on the PubMed Central archive within 12 months of publication. Such landmark legislation begs commentary from the editors of a scholarly journal on scholarly publishing, and as the North American Editor I feel a responsibility to comment. This event has long been anticipated, but now that it is a reality new things will begin to happen. The NIH will have to manage a tremendous influx of materials and monitor compliance. I suppose the NIH will also institute penalties for non-compliance – probably withholding future funding, which is already in jeopardy from several years of appropriations falling below inflation. Perhaps there will be a subsequent outcry from authors who don’t like the submission system (a previous study1 suggested it was far from perfect) or who find the ruling burdensome. Or perhaps not . . . and there will be quiet compliance. In any case, none of us has the requisite ‘crystal ball’ to see the future of publishing under this new mandate. But two things are pivotal: (1) the NIH, unlike private institutions such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has no mandate to pay publishers’ access fees (and if it did, researchers and the public would soon rail against the misuse of research funds to support publishing enterprises); and (2) libraries and researchers worldwide can now rest assured that the most prolific and highly funded biomedical research institution in the world will archive and make free all of its research results. Given these two points, and the tough funding climate of academic libraries, what is the likelihood that libraries will simply stop subscribing to journals that are largely comprised of NIH-funded research articles? It’s not far-fetched to imagine (and indeed studies2,3 have suggested) that institutional subscriptions, especially for niche journals, could soon be devastated. In this environment, one advantage that large (typically commercial) publishers have over small self-publishing societies lies in the size of their collection of journals compared with one or two isolated titles; large publishers are protected by the collection business. This can be likened to the retail business, where several individual outlets of a massive retail chain can fail, but the whole chain will succeed as long as the retailer offers a competitive product that is valued by the majority. In publishing, additional value is created by tools that enhance the collection and the experience of the user. Cutting-edge quality filters and functionality ultimately enable research to be done better and faster. As seen over and over in dotcom businesses, such major advances require huge investments to develop, test, fail, and succeed in building new technologies. This simply is not possible for small society publishers to carry out on their own. The fragility of small society publishers has been largely understated or side-stepped in the pro-access dialogue. Small societies’ publishing programs are often (but not always) a significant source of revenue. So the pro-access argument urges societies to find new revenue streams and to stop depending on publishing income (especially subscriptions revenue), but to continue to engage at least in peer review. However, societies are governed by councils and committees, and no one person can de facto determine business plan shifts. Furthermore, the governing councils and committees are comprised of academic volunteers. Such volunteers prudently use their limited resources to sustain existing meaningful society activities – e.g. programming of meetings and conferences4,5 – rather than to forge momentous change that might, or might not, produce new sources of revenue. That impetus generally has to come from paid society executives, but many of these are themselves academicians who want to act responsibly, which typically means taking few risks. Thus, much like government and academia itself, Editorial 83