|
ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical
Research Literature
Richard H. Lathrop, Chair, ISCB Public Affairs Committee
Burkhard
Rost, ISCB President
For the ISCB Membership, Executive Committee,
Board of
Directors, and Public Affairs & Policies Committee
ISCB Members are
invited to add their names to the list of signatories at:
www.iscb.org/iscb-policy-statements/literature_open_access/signup
Current signatories are listed at:
www.iscb.org/iscb-policy-statements/literature_open_access/signatories
Preamble The International Society for Computational
Biology (ISCB) is dedicated to advancing human knowledge at the intersection of
computation and life sciences. On behalf of the ISCB members, this public policy
statement expresses strong support for open access, reuse, integration, and
distillation of the publicly funded archival scientific and technical research
literature, and for the infrastructure to achieve that goal.
Knowledge is
the fruit of the research endeavor, and the archival scientific and technical
research literature is its practical expression and means of communication.
Shared knowledge multiplies in utility because every new scientific discovery is
built upon previous scientific knowledge. Access to knowledge is access to the
power to solve new problems and make informed decisions. Free, open, public,
online access to the archival scientific and technical research literature will
empower citizens and scientists to solve more problems and make better, more
informed decisions. Attribution to the original authors will maintain
consistency and accountability within the knowledge base. Computational reuse,
integration, and distillation of that literature will produce new and as yet
unforeseen knowledge.
We strongly encourage open software, data, and
databases, issues that are not addressed here. A prior ISCB public policy
statement on sharing software provides very clear support for open source/open
access (www.iscb.org/iscb-policy-statements/software_sharing).
We support open database access, standards, and interoperability. We also
recognize that databases are complex dynamic entities, with ongoing roles and
needs that cannot be treated properly within this statement. In contrast, the
publicly funded archival research literature, addressed here, is the static
historical record of publicly funded research outcomes.
ISCB supports
many of the principles set forth in other open-access policies and statements,
including the "Budapest Open Access Initiative," the "Bethesda Declaration on
Open Access Publishing," the Bulletin of the World Health Organization
"Equitable Access to Scientific and Technical Information for Health," the US
National Academies of Sciences report on "Sharing Publication-Related Data and
Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences," the
Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development "Principles and
Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding," and the "Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities." Details
on the documents mentioned here and additional background information material
may be found in the online version of this statement at
www.iscb.org/iscb-policy-statements/literature_open_access
The
public policy statement put forward here builds upon these principles to
elucidate in more detail the public policy position of ISCB and its members on
this important issue in scientific dissemination.
Public Policy Statement
The International Society for Computational Biology strongly advocates free, open, public, online: (i) access by person or machine to the publicly-funded archival scientific and technical research literature; and (ii) computational reuse, integration, and distillation of that literature into higher-order knowledge elements.
|
Supporting Statements
- The possibilities latent in the digital information age make it
essential to achieve open access, and computational reuse, integration, and
distillation, of the publicly funded archival research literature.
- Immediate access is preferable, and when access is at an interval following
publication, that interval should not exceed one year.
- At a minimum,
every scientific journal should offer an open access option to every published
research paper, as does every official or affiliated journal of the ISCB.
- Copyright licenses explicitly should permit computational reuse,
integration, and distillation, using standard existing language that eliminates
the need for manual or legal review.
- The format of the available article
should be easy to parse by both human and machine (e.g., HTML). Ideally, a plain
text version should be available as well (e.g., TXT), to facilitate
computational reuse and integration (e.g., computational text mining for
knowledge extraction).
- Computational reuse, integration, and distillation
should give attribution to the original authors.
- Existing open access models show high impact, scientific benefit,
feasibility, and acceptability.
-
The public benefit from open access to the world's online information via the publicly funded Internet provides a good model of expected impact.
-
The scientific fertilization from open access to genomic information via the publicly funded Human Genome Project provides a good model of expected scientific benefit.
-
Open access policies by the US National Institutes of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Wellcome Trust provide good models of feasibility and acceptability.
-
The Creative Commons Attribution License and the Science Commons Open Access Data Mark provide good models of legal mechanisms for computational reuse, integration, and distillation.
- Open literature access, reuse, integration, and distillation will enable
a whole new generation of innovative computational tools and processes. The
literature will be endowed with enriched commentary and usability. It will
be connected seamlessly, by proper semantic links, to relevant Web sites,
data, databases, and algorithms. Creating a web of knowledge around
publications is an important consequence of semantic enrichment of the
research literature. Such tools already are being built by publishers,
researchers, entrepreneurs, and others. The further development of these
tools should be supported aggressively. Removing all barriers to literature
open access, reuse, integration, and distillation is critical to achieving
such a knowledge-level transformation.
- Supplementary data and methods should be openly available online, in
sufficient detail to replicate the reported research results and facilitate
reuse. Such material should be deposited in appropriate public repositories,
in compliance with accepted community standards, and in accord with the
existing ISCB public policy statement on sharing software. It should allow
for application of other computational methods to the data and application
of other data to the computational methods.
- Publishing high-quality peer-reviewed scientific literature incurs
costs. We recognize that cost recovery is a serious issue that must be
addressed carefully if open access is to be a mandated policy.
- Open-access policy details - which version, where stored, how annotated
and organized, what incentives, etc. - must be considered carefully. However,
it has now become essential to put forward a broad policy mandate for public
access to, and computational reuse, integration, and distillation of, the
publicly funded archival scientific and technical research literature.
- This statement is intentionally neutral about any specific funding
policy. Many implementations all may achieve the same essential goal.
Acceptable funding policies should:
-
Remove barriers to open access and subsequent computational
reuse, integration, and distillation.
-
Encourage public, private, and philanthropic funding organizations to establish policies that mandate free, open, public, online access to, and computational reuse, integration, and distillation of, the research results funded from their public, private, or philanthropic support.
-
Promote the body of publicly funded archival research literature as a public investment that bears interest, and not as an ongoing access cost to the public.
-
Establish copyright licenses in standard terms that permit literature access, reuse, and integration.
-
Specify a format that is easy to parse by both human and
machine (e.g., HTML); and, ideally, also provide a plain
text version (e.g., TXT) to facilitate computational reuse
and integration.
-
Recognize the need to fund activities of peer review, copy editing, and publishing.
-
Provide fairness to several groups, including the developing world and its health concerns, unfunded or under-funded researchers, and others.
-
Provide fair interim support or compensation, if and where needed, to facilitate making transitions and adaptations to new models for publishing and sustaining essential revenue.
-
Be consistent with government laws, patent requirements, other existing regulations, and research dissemination through viable commercial mechanisms.
-
The expected cost of complete open access to the publicly funded archival research literature is only a very small percentage of the entire publicly funded international research endeavor. Nevertheless, it is undesirable to divert funding from current research and thus risk underfunding basic science. New funding should be made available for open-access policy implementations.
Conclusion Currently,
scientific advancement is limited by article availability, access costs,
copyright restrictions, document formats, bulk download limits, etc. All
such barriers should be removed.
The publicly funded archival
scientific and technical research literature represents a substantial
investment by the public, governments, foundations, non-profit institutions,
publishers, individuals, and others. We in the ISCB are committed to the
continuous enhancement and leveraging of society's knowledge resources. One
of our primary missions is the computational integration of individual
pieces of knowledge from the research literature and databases, in ways that
provide powerful new ideas and insights for next-stage research, for the
benefit of the scientific community and society in general.
To
achieve these public benefits, we strongly advocate free, open, public,
online access to the publicly funded archival scientific and technical
research literature, and the computational reuse, integration, and
distillation of that literature into higher-order knowledge elements.
The example scenario illustrates an important public health benefit that
could be achieved immediately: the opportunity to pursue useful
knowledge-based innovations, by computational reuse, integration, and
distillation of the publicly funded archival research literature, across
many areas in biology and medicine.
 |