Aborting OA: government interference in science

Sarah Lai Stirland reports on Wired’s Threat Level blog that a bibliographic database run by Johns Hopkins University has blocked all searches related to abortion — because the project receives funding from a U.S. federal agency which prohibits grantees from promoting the practice.

In a sense, this tension between scientific independence and state power (especially the power of the purse) is nothing new, as any schoolchild familiar with the trial of Galileo knows. But the timing of this story — just a few days before the new NIH public access policy takes effect, requiring funded researchers to deposit their manuscripts in a central database — begs comparison.

(First, though, it’s worth nothing the biggest difference: the funder in this case is USAID, which primarily funds development programs, unlike the NIH or similar agencies which primarily fund academic research. The latter, unlike the former, can be expected to have a culture of healthy respect for academic freedom. The former’s policy of censorship has a decades-old history and, while protested by reproductive rights activists, could be expected to draw little attention from the research community. By contrast, a new policy of censorship by an agency like the NIH could be expected to spark outrage by researchers.)

No doubt some skeptics of open access will take the opportunity to again insinuate that OA equals government censorship, as the American Association of Publishers’ consultant so famously suggested. Others, who prefer institutional repositories to those organized by funders or discipline, may add the supposed threat to academic freedom to their litany of arguments in favor of IRs (though others, in conversation, have suggested the same logic applies against IRs, by increasing the influence of the university relative to the faculty member in the dissemination of research).

In reality, funder repositories are no greater interference in the conduct of science than the funding itself (likewise with institutional repositories). Nevertheless, I’ll suggest three strategies to minimize the risk:

1. Recognize the importance of Peter Suber’s second principle for university open access policies. The principle, as developed by Suber in the April 2008 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, is: Universities should not limit the freedom of faculty to submit their work to the journals of their choice.

   Situations like that of the JHU database call into question Peter’s assertion that “[funders] have an interest in making that research as useful and widely available as possible, and virtually no competing interests.” (See also point 2, below.)

   We must remember that the imperative is OA, not OA through a particular venue. Preserving the author’s right to publish where she wishes, and to self-archive where she wishes (non-exclusive), doesn’t prevent undue interference with academic freedom, but it leaves other options open and mitigates the damage (see also point 3, below).

2. Erect firewalls for academic freedom when institutions and public agencies take new roles in disseminating research. (Really, this applies to any new entrant in the field of disseminating information, but state actors and institutions which employ faculty have the most concentrated capacity for influence.)

   For the avoidance of doubt, concern for academic freedom is not an argument against OA, or an argument for universities or research funders not to act in support of OA. But we should be conscious to erect basic bulwarks against the erosion of that freedom.

   In the case of NIH’s PubMedCentral, a simple policy to the effect that “All NIH-funded research accepted for publication in a scientific journal shall be included in PubMedCentral without prejudice to the topic or conclusions” would establish a formal rule against situations like the Hopkins database finds itself in.

   Another basic firewall should be expectation that, where information is removed or edited for any reason, that change should be transparent to the reader. (In this case, the Hopkins database contained no notification of the change.) Even in Google in China tells users that their search results are being censored.

3. Use copy-permissive licenses on research publications to ensure maximum dissemination.

   Imagine a similar situation in which a database’s search results are censored. A mirror site could easily copy the database’s content and provide an unfiltered search interface. To be fair, an external search engine like Google could do so, too; but while that might solve this problem, imagine instead that the database is deleting publications altogether, and that (for whatever reason) the database contains the only copy of the article on the Web.

   Giving permission to copy makes censorship less effective: as the saying goes, lots of copies keeps stuff safe.

   • Aside: Some people have little regard for eliminating permission barriers as a goal of OA. They aren’t sure precisely why someone else should be able to copy, translate, format-shift, or mashup their research. But that’s exactly the point of eliminating permission barriers: it enables uses we can’t even imagine (in addition to the ones we can, which are important and valuable in their own right).

     I see it as the corollary to seemingly “harmless failures” in security systems: eliminating permission barriers to research publications may be a seemingly benefit-less success. With apologies to Ed Felten, having identified a benefitless success, there are two ways to proceed. The first way is to think carefully about the possible benefits, and realize that some of it is actually useful. The second way is to think, “This looks like a benefitless success, but we should do it anyway. Maybe good can come of this.” The first way protects you if you’re clever; the second way always protects you.

Update: Hopkins has reversed its decision. The sponsoring school’s dean released a statement, saying in part,

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.

That is precisely the right response. It’s a dedication I wish academics would live up to more often (see: progress on open access to research, open courseware, adoption of FOSS in higher ed, etc.)