Public access policy in the United States: Impact of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

*Corresponding author: T. Scott Plutchak, Librarian Epistemologist, Birmingham, AL, USA. E-mail: splutchak@gmail.com Key points • The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was formed in 2009 at the request of a US Congressional Committee to develop recommendations for public access policy. • Published in January 2010, the Roundtable’s recommendations had a significant impact on the guidelines for federal funding agencies issued in 2013. • The Roundtable was unique in bringing together individuals holding divergent views about open access policy. • The success of the Roundtable may provide important lessons for policymakers in addressing open access issues.


INTRODUCTION
from the two camps variously claim that expanding the NIH policy would destroy the market for commercial journals, that it would have no impact whatsoever on subscriptions that peer review was done by volunteers at no cost, that managing peer review cost a single publisher millions of dollars a year, and that 'This is not an issue of economic impact. This is not an issue of peer review. This is about control'. Such was typical of the public rhetoric at the time (Suber, 2008). And as a result, pressure was building in Congress and on the White House to take action.
Imagine, then, the scene at the Capitol Lounge, a favourite watering hole for Congressional and White House staff. 'We've got to do something! My boss is getting hammered by both sides and he's getting fed up'.
There's that bill that the librarians are pushing. Sounds pretty noble.
But the guy from AAP says it'll kill their business. Is he right? I don't know anything about publishing, and I have to take anything the lobbyists tell me with several grains of salt. I just want somebody with real expertise to give me some advice without me feeling like I'm being pitched all the time! She looks into her glass. 'Our #2 says she knows one of the guys coming to the meeting this week. A physicist. Worked on big DOE projects for years, but runs a publishing outfit now. She thinks the boss'll be willing to sponsor a staff committeea roundtable'. He looks at her quizzically. 'Get a small group of outside experts to hash out a consensus. But you've got to get the right mix of people so that it doesn't turn into just more lobbying. And it's got to be a little under the radar so they can get something done. She thinks this guy might be the one to organize it. If he's willing'.
'It's worth a shot. Let me know. I'll keep OSTP in the loop'. These early campaigns treated all science publishers as a monolithic adversary, despite wide variations in business models and practices. Certainly, the pricing policies of the larger commercial publishers seemed to reflect a captive market in which their journal prices increasingly exceeded their publication costs. The substantial profit margins of the largest made them acutely vulnerable to charges of unfair exploitation. Society publishers, whose margins and subscription rates were generally modest, had seen themselves as fierce defenders of science, but they also viewed an immediate shift to OA as an existential threat. By 2008, the landscape had devolved to an aggressive, adversarial legislative battle between two warring factions: on one side were open access partisans, who framed their objectives in moral terms, dismissing the fundamental economic issues involved in the major industry shift they were demanding. Publishers, with a group of highly profitable commercial journal publishers now in the lead, believed OA represented a potentially lethal blow to their business model and sought to prevent any government-mandated free access.

THE GENESIS OF THE ROUNDTABLE
It was in this climate of inflammatory rhetoric and mutual condemnation that the plan for the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

DEVELOPING THE REPORT
When finally assembled, the group was a very carefully balanced mix: Three university provosts, three librarians (one of whom had been a provost), executives of four publishing companies-large, small, commercial, not-for-profit-and three scholarly communication researchers (see the end of the article for names and affiliations). On 19 June, the group met with members of the House Committee on Science and Technology and their staff. According to the official invitation from Sokolov, Committee Chair Gordon had 'promised the scholarly publishers that he would host an offthe-record roundtable to try to get past the old arguments and facilitate a way forward in terms of federal policy for our funding agencies'. Sokolov went on to say '[t]he White House Office of Science and Technology Policy itself is in the early stages of thinking about an overarching federal policy, and they will be participating in this roundtable as well' (Sokolov, personal communication, 2 June 2009).
The evening before the meeting most of the group gathered for dinner in a private room at the Tabard Inn. Everyone in the group knew somebody, but no one knew everybody. Dylla and Vaughn believed that this dinner, and the ones that preceded each of the roundtable's subsequent meetings, were critical to the group's success. They deliberately sought people whose opinions and backgrounds covered a wide spectrum of views on the key issues. The members would come to the group with some perspectives that were very much at odds with each other. For consensus positions to be found, it would be necessary to establish a basis for candour and trust. The participants would need to express their disagreements freely, while listening openly, with a willingness to consider changing their minds. They were to represent their own views, not serve as mouthpieces of the organiza- attended these meetings (in person or by phone), but served primarily as resources, rather than full participants. No funding or other support was provided by the Committee or OSTP. (AAU and AAP each contributed $5 K for expenses along with administrative support). Structuring the Roundtable this way ensured that the final report truly represented the independent views of the participants.
The Roundtable met in person three more times (10 July, 22 July and 7 August) for 4-h sessions, with dinner the evening before. As noted above, Vaughn and Dylla believed that these shared meals were beneficial for developing the relationships necessary to support candid discussions. These discussions were part fact-finding, part advocacy, part investigation of the effects of various proposals on the full range of constituencies. Although some of the initial disagreements were intense, the focus remained clear-could they establish consensus recommendations that would inform US government policy? At the outset there was certainly some scepticism among the participants about the likelihood of achieving that.
Although the initial charge to the Roundtable was quite broad and could be construed to include such research outputs as datasets and the various progress reports required by granting agencies, the group quickly agreed to concentrate on peerreviewed publications. This was the most contentious area for the affected constituencies, and if the Roundtable was going to develop concrete recommendations in only a few months, the scope needed to be tightly focused. The members were determined to base their recommendations in fact rather than ideology and advocacy. Still, they recognized that a major research project investigating all of the relevant aspects of scholarly publication would require time and resources far beyond what they had available. In addressing this challenge, the contributions from the researchers were invaluable. They were able to bring a wealth of material covering access issues, publishing economics, the behaviour of researchers, the decision-making processes of librarians and more. Nonetheless, large gaps in the knowledge base remained.
Some agreements came easily. As a 'strawman' high-level goal, the group quickly identified the desired outcome as 'provide optimized access to vetted, validated scholarly publications to the most people with the fewest impediments possible'. Five basic principles were quickly agreed to, and the Roundtable returned to these repeatedly.
• High-quality thorough peer review • Sustainable, adaptable business models • Accessibility to scholars and the public • Assured preservation and archiving

• Interoperability
Considerable time was spent discussing business models and the effects of embargoes (i.e., the length of time between the initial publication of a research article and a version of the article being made freely available to the public). PLoS provided a detailed example of one type of OA publisher, but in general, the lack of transparency by publishers of all types, along with their vast variability, made it impossible to make more than general observations and conclusions. The data available on the effects of embargoes was scant and anecdotal, eliminating the possibility of broad fact-based conclusions.
There was a shared understanding that because of the likelihood of major technological impacts in just the next few years, any policies put in place needed to be flexible and subject to change. This led many in the group to argue that a legislative mandate would be unwise because it would be difficult to modify in response to changing conditions. A better approach would be flexible policies coordinated by OSTP and developed in close consultation with all of the stakeholders. All members agreed that the federal government needed to play a role, but there continued to be strong disagreements about how extensive and prescriptive that role should be.
Although the guidelines from Sokolov indicated that the group was not expected to revisit the NIH Policy, which the Committee and the White House considered settled, the Round- O'Donnell, Taylor and Vaughn developed a 'green paper' draft for discussion at the last of the in-person meetings.
As summer moved to fall, a set of broad recommendations emerged that all of the members felt they could generally support. The drafting team used the green paper as the basis for the first draft of the full report, which was distributed to the members in early November. There followed a series of conference calls to develop and refine the report. With the written language in front of them, the remaining disagreements sharpened. Some of the calls were contentious, and there were moments when it looked as if the entire effort might fall apart. But the members had each put in a great deal of time and effort, and the meetings during the summer had established a basis of trust, enabling the group to work through their disagreements towards mutual understanding.
In the end, the group did not quite achieve unanimity, with Mark Patterson (PLoS) (Patterson, 2010) and YS Chi (Elsevier) (Chi, 2010) drafting dissenting statements that were posted and distributed with the final report. While they agreed with most of the recommendations, neither of them felt they could fully sign off. As Plutchak described their concerns in an editorial published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association: What the dissents come down to is a matter of control This is an important discussion to have. (Plutchak, 2010) Patterson and Chi both reviewed the draft of the editorial before it was published and gave it their blessing. Patterson: 'As far as your comments about myself are concerned, I think you're very fair. Many thanks again' (Patterson, personal communication, 20 May 2010

FROM THE REPORT TO THE HOLDREN MEMO
The Report, along with the two dissents, was published in January 2010 and delivered to Congress and the White House (Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, 2010). Reactions from the scholarly communication community were predictably mixed.
Within hours of the report's release, Peter Suber (Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and a prolific OA advocate) commented, saying that '[t]here's a lot to like here'. However, he focused mostly on the report's failure to call for an OA mandate. He went on, 'One more clue as to why the group may have decided not to endorse OA mandates: The only working scientists on the panel were either in library science or had become publishers. I respect all the participants, but the panel omitted a significant, probably the most significant, stakeholder group' (Suber, 2010). In fact, the very extensive publication records of a number of Roundtable members attest to their significant contributions as working scientists in economics, physics, humanities, neurosciences and scholarly communication.
The Association of American University Publishers (AAUP) was enthusiastic, saying 'we think it vital that the Roundtable's further recommendations, with their emphasis on consultation, cooperation, interoperability, authority, preservation and long-term sus-

Rick Anderson (then the Associate Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication at the University of Utah) writing in
Learned Publishing, said 'the report leaves room for traditional publishing with its explicit support for the idea of limited embargoes. If that support leaves some in the open access and STM publishing communities equally dissatisfied, that is probably a mark of success. Given the intractable economic realities that govern knowledge creation, it seems clear to me that the Roundtable's vision of a future that includes 'diverse and flexible market-driven approaches' is spot on' (Anderson, 2010).
In the aftermath of the Report's release, members of the In the spring of 2012, Michael Stebbins, the person at OSTP who was primarily responsible for drafting those guidelines, was reaching out to a number of constituencies to inform OSTP's thinking. It wasn't easy work, but the general intent and outline of the guidelines were in place. The major remaining sticking point was the length of any embargo that would be specified.
SPARC and its allies were continuing to push for a maximum 6 months for all publications, arguing that the lack of demonstrable negative impacts on publishers from the NIH 12-month embargo proved that a shorter embargo would not harm publishers. Meanwhile, the publisher lobby was continuing to argue that anything shorter than 12 months would be unsustainable. June the organizers claimed victory (Higgins, 2012).
Nonetheless, it would be another 8 months (not until after Obama's second inauguration) before the release of the OSTP memorandum 'Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research' (Holdren, 2013). Coincident with that release, Dr. John Holdren, OSTP's Director, finally posted the official Obama administration response to the petition, thanking the petitioners for their participation (We the People, 2012). OSTP had 'been looking into this issue for some time and has reached out to the public on two occasions for input on the question of how best to achieve this goal of democratizing the results of federally funded research'. The petition, he wrote, 'has been important to our discussions'.
The petition's organizers may not have gotten all they wanted or expected, but the Holdren memo, as it came to be called, was a major milestone in the advancement of public access. The OSTP guidelines would become the critical directives for federal agencies that provided $100 million or more in research funding annually. They included most of the key elements from the Roundtable report. They emphasized the importance of maintaining archives and interoperability. They encouraged public-private collaboration and innovation. They specified a maximum 12-month embargo, while encouraging flexibility and requiring agencies to establish a process for petitions, based on evidence, to adjust the embargo timeframe. Over the next few years, 22 federal agencies developed public access plans for publications and data based on the directives in this memo.

EPILOGUE
As the Roundtable members anticipated, the scholarly communication landscape has changed considerably over the decade plus since the release of the Report. As a result of the Holdren memo, virtually all new peer-reviewed publications based on federally funded research are freely available, in some form, no later than 12 months after publication and in many instances much sooner.
Within months, spurred on by the Holdren memo, a group of publishers began to develop CHORUS (originally an acronym for Clearing House for the Open Research of the United States, but dropped as an acronym when the organization started working in other countries) as a vehicle for providing public access to articles from the publisher sites, exemplifying the kind of public-private collaboration envisioned by the Roundtable and OSTP (Dylla & Salmon, 2020). The ARL, in cooperation with AAU and the Although open data policies were outside the scope of the Roundtable's work, they were included in the Holdren directive.
While data has proven to be a much more difficult challenge, significant progress is being made. Procedures and compliance are still much more rudimentary than for publications, but all of the But progress continues to be made, as long as all of the stakeholders are willing to remain engaged and committed to seeking balanced solutions to often conflicting goals.
The early proponents of open access framed it as a moral crusade. Believing that the public interest and private interests could never be reconciled, the OA movement pursued a legislative goal that would mandate a particular one size for all type of open access, regardless of what the (intended or unintended) consequences might be. The understandably defensive publishing sector was split into two quite different groups: commercial journal publishers, some of which generated generous profits with seemingly unrestrained pricing policies and not-for-profit academic and scientific society publishers, whose generally lower cost journals nonetheless produced critical revenue for their societies, whose memberships comprised primarily the researchers whose work they published. One of the paralysing results of this pitched battle was that individuals who might have been allies in other circumstances found themselves on the opposite sides of a very public rhetorical war. Both sides dug in, and very little progress could be made.
The Roundtable was successful in having a major impact because it took a very different approach. Collaboration and compromise are very difficult. Trust is hard to come by. The organizers of the Roundtable believed that by bringing together people with the full range of views in an atmosphere of trust, with a willingness to listen, key people could find enough agreement to influence public policy in ways that would make a significant difference. The legislative mandates desired by the OA partisans have not come to fruition, but thanks in significant measure to that small group of determined individuals who were committed to listening to each other in the pursuit of consensus, many of the outcomes those partisans desired have come to pass.