Obama Signs Act to Make More Federally Funded Research Open Access: NIH Requirement Extended to Other Agencies

Abstract

The steady march toward open access publishing advanced again in January when US lawmakers extended mandates already covering National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded research to other federal agencies. The open access mandates were included in the $1.1 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014, signed by President Obama on January 17, 2014. The bill requires all agencies in the federal Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Labor that spend $100 million or more per year on research and development to provide free online access to the work they fund within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill effectively ensures that half of the total $60 billion annual US investment in taxpayer-funded research will be freely accessible within a year of publication.“This is an important step toward making federally funded scientific research available for everyone to use online at no cost,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a coalition of research libraries that seeks to reduce library expenses.The federal mandates represent another win for advocates of open access, who have gained a number of victories during the last 15 years, with the increasing prevalence of the Internet in modern communication and increasing journal subscription fees. And with more legislation pending, including the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act, the push for entirely open access will continue.“Will we get to a point where all research is immediately available? I think we’re on the road there,” said Cameron Neylon, an advocate for open access for the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the nonprofit, open access scientific publishing project.The movement to provide free online public access to research began around the turn of the century. One of the first formal discussions came in late 2001, when the Open Society Institute called a meeting of open access advocates in Budapest. At this meeting, participants worked to define open access as the free availability of research on the public Internet, permitting all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles. This gathering of a handful of academics became known as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and included among the document’s original 13 signatories were biologist and PLOS cofounder Michael Eisen and philosopher Peter Suber.What began as a small movement has grown rapidly.“It used to be a call for open access by only a number of people,” said Suber, who is now both director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and director of the Harvard Open Access Project. “But it’s kept growing, and the growth has been accelerating. It used to be fringe and now it’s mainstream, now it’s the official policy of many universities and, increasingly, the government.”The PLOS experienceOne of the key catalysts in the open access movement was the creation of PLOS, an initiative by former NIH director Harold Varmus, Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown, and Eisen. They asked fellow scientists to pledge after September 2001 to no longer submit articles to journals that did not provide open access to their research within 6 months of publication. Although there was support among their colleagues, the PLOS founders realized that there were few existing journals offering such terms of publication. So in 2003, PLOS Biology was launched, followed by PLOS Medicine in 2004. By the end of the decade, PLOS was publishing 10 journals.PLOS, which charges a publication fee paid by the study authors or their institution, reached the breakeven point financially in 2010, Neylon said. “People were very skeptical that it was possible to publish with this kind of business model,” he said. “What PLOS did is show that this could be done at scale, that this was a viable model for scholarly publishing.”As PLOS began publishing more open access journals, and dozens of other journals with similar policies sprouted up, some of the major funders of research, such as NIH and the Wellcome Trust, began putting policies into place that required free online access to research they funded. The NIH established its policy in 2008. As this happened, some universities followed suit, changing their open access guidelines from recommendations to requirements.Costs skyrocketCosts have been one driver of change. In recent years, as universities have sought to cut expenses, they have eyed journal subscription fees. Writing to all Harvard University faculty members in 2012, the Faculty Advisory Council to the Harvard Library said it could no longer sustain major periodical subscriptions. “Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,” the council wrote. “Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75 million. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.”Suber addressed this “journal pricing crisis” in a 2012 essay for the Open Society Foundation. “The system worked well until the prices of print journals began to rise faster than inflation in the 1970s. Prices have risen faster than inflation, and faster than library budgets, continuously for almost four decades. Even the wealthiest academic libraries are forced to make budget-driven cancellations every year. Harvard does so, for example, and recently told its faculty that journal prices are untenable and unsustainable,” he wrote. “One more piece of context: In 2010, Elsevier, the largest publisher of scholarly journals, reported a profit margin of 36 percent. In the same year, ExxonMobil reported only 28 percent.”Elsevier publishes Annals of Emergency Medicine.In 2012, during the same year that academics were crying foul over high journal subscription fees and how they were acting to limit access not just to the public but also increasingly to professors, a petition appeared on the White House’s We the People Web site. The online petition, which garnered in excess of 67,000 signatures, called on President Obama to extend the rules put into place by the NIH in 2008 to all federal agencies. The White House responded in February 2013, with a memorandum to federal agencies requiring them to ensure public access to research they fund within 12 months of publication.In reply to the petition, John Holdren, senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues, wrote that the White House had been concerned about open access for some time. “We know that scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators,” Holdren wrote. “Policies that mobilize these intellectual assets for reuse through broader access can accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote economic growth. That’s why the Obama Administration is committed to ensuring that the results of federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.”The mandate language in the 2014 omnibus bill is similar to the President’s memorandum of 2013 and strengthens the provisions by enacting them into legislation.Publishers have been taken aback by these developments. Chris Capot, director of Corporate Relations for Elsevier, deferred to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade association for US book publishers. In a statement issued in February, the AAP decried the manner in which the open access language was passed within the omnibus bill. “Hiding substantive legislation that affects US taxpayers on page 1020 of a 1500-page appropriations bill—without a chance for debate and in violation of Congressional rules—is bad process and leads to bad law,” the organization stated. “With this legislation, the proponents of one-size-fits-all, no-exemptions 12-month embargoes have shown their reluctance to expose the merits of their assumptions to the full debate possible in ‘regular order’ legislative process.”Faster and FASTRThe AAP and publishers are also lobbying against the FASTR act, a proposal that would cut the embargo time from 12 to 6 months, as well as provide more generous terms of use, allowing scholars to reuse articles as long as the original authors and source are cited.“It’s not just enough for people to be able to read this research, but to use it,” said Neylon, the PLOS open access advocate. “We don’t want to live in a world where it’s look but don’t touch.”The FASTR Act, as of early March, had not advanced in the US House or Senate, but supporters were optimistic that it would move forward. It has a coalition of bipartisan supporters, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).“Breakthroughs in technology, science, medicine and dozens of other disciplines are made every year due to the billions in research funding provided by the American people,” Wyden said. “Making those findings available to all Americans is the best way to lead the next generation of discovery and innovation or create the next game-changing business. The FASTR act provides that access because taxpayer-funded research should never be hidden behind a pay wall.”The AAP criticized the FASTR Act, arguing that it would require federal agencies to undertake extensive, open-ended work already being performed successfully by the private sector, add significant ongoing costs to those agencies’ budgets, and undermine publishers’ efforts to provide access to high-quality peer-review research publications in a sustainable way.But open access advocates say FASTR-type reform is inevitable, considering the momentum behind the push to increase public access to federal research and the ways in which the Internet is changing publishing.“It’s inconceivable that we would fail to take advantage of the Internet,” Suber said. “It widens distribution and reduces cost at the same time.”Beyond FASTRFASTR goes a long way, he said, with open licensing and a relatively short embargo. However, it covers only federally funded research, and Suber’s goal is for all kinds of research to be open access—every country, every field, privately and publicly funded both.“I think there’s harm in any embargo, especially in a field where timely notice of findings is important, like with medicine,” Suber said. “Publisher revenues don’t stack up against the life, health, and well-being of patients. But I do acknowledge that it’s difficult to get there politically right away.”Even so, the trend seems clear, both in the United States and abroad. In 2012, the British government accepted a report on open access by Dame Janet Finch that had a principal recommendation that publicly funded research move to a “gold” model, whereby article processing charges are paid upfront to cover the cost of publication, as PLOS and other open access journals do.Lobby efforts notwithstanding, publishers are now experimenting with alternatives to subscription fees. In a statement issued at the Finch report’s release, Elsevier stated, “The recommendations identify real opportunities, as well as risks, and how they are implemented will be key in ensuring sustainable models for scholarly communications.”In addition to the legislative action in the United States and abroad, this openness on the part of publishers to experiment with new models is the biggest sign that open access will continue to progress, Neylon said. “The big change in the last couple of years is that traditional publishers [are] seeing this as a viable opportunity for the future and increasingly something they now need to catch up on,” he said. “The direction of travel is now very clear.” The steady march toward open access publishing advanced again in January when US lawmakers extended mandates already covering National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded research to other federal agencies. The open access mandates were included in the $1.1 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014, signed by President Obama on January 17, 2014. The bill requires all agencies in the federal Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Labor that spend $100 million or more per year on research and development to provide free online access to the work they fund within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill effectively ensures that half of the total $60 billion annual US investment in taxpayer-funded research will be freely accessible within a year of publication. “This is an important step toward making federally funded scientific research available for everyone to use online at no cost,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a coalition of research libraries that seeks to reduce library expenses. The federal mandates represent another win for advocates of open access, who have gained a number of victories during the last 15 years, with the increasing prevalence of the Internet in modern communication and increasing journal subscription fees. And with more legislation pending, including the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act, the push for entirely open access will continue. “Will we get to a point where all research is immediately available? I think we’re on the road there,” said Cameron Neylon, an advocate for open access for the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the nonprofit, open access scientific publishing project. The movement to provide free online public access to research began around the turn of the century. One of the first formal discussions came in late 2001, when the Open Society Institute called a meeting of open access advocates in Budapest. At this meeting, participants worked to define open access as the free availability of research on the public Internet, permitting all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles. This gathering of a handful of academics became known as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and included among the document’s original 13 signatories were biologist and PLOS cofounder Michael Eisen and philosopher Peter Suber. What began as a small movement has grown rapidly. “It used to be a call for open access by only a number of people,” said Suber, who is now both director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and director of the Harvard Open Access Project. “But it’s kept growing, and the growth has been accelerating. It used to be fringe and now it’s mainstream, now it’s the official policy of many universities and, increasingly, the government.” The PLOS experienceOne of the key catalysts in the open access movement was the creation of PLOS, an initiative by former NIH director Harold Varmus, Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown, and Eisen. They asked fellow scientists to pledge after September 2001 to no longer submit articles to journals that did not provide open access to their research within 6 months of publication. Although there was support among their colleagues, the PLOS founders realized that there were few existing journals offering such terms of publication. So in 2003, PLOS Biology was launched, followed by PLOS Medicine in 2004. By the end of the decade, PLOS was publishing 10 journals.PLOS, which charges a publication fee paid by the study authors or their institution, reached the breakeven point financially in 2010, Neylon said. “People were very skeptical that it was possible to publish with this kind of business model,” he said. “What PLOS did is show that this could be done at scale, that this was a viable model for scholarly publishing.”As PLOS began publishing more open access journals, and dozens of other journals with similar policies sprouted up, some of the major funders of research, such as NIH and the Wellcome Trust, began putting policies into place that required free online access to research they funded. The NIH established its policy in 2008. As this happened, some universities followed suit, changing their open access guidelines from recommendations to requirements. One of the key catalysts in the open access movement was the creation of PLOS, an initiative by former NIH director Harold Varmus, Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown, and Eisen. They asked fellow scientists to pledge after September 2001 to no longer submit articles to journals that did not provide open access to their research within 6 months of publication. Although there was support among their colleagues, the PLOS founders realized that there were few existing journals offering such terms of publication. So in 2003, PLOS Biology was launched, followed by PLOS Medicine in 2004. By the end of the decade, PLOS was publishing 10 journals. PLOS, which charges a publication fee paid by the study authors or their institution, reached the breakeven point financially in 2010, Neylon said. “People were very skeptical that it was possible to publish with this kind of business model,” he said. “What PLOS did is show that this could be done at scale, that this was a viable model for scholarly publishing.” As PLOS began publishing more open access journals, and dozens of other journals with similar policies sprouted up, some of the major funders of research, such as NIH and the Wellcome Trust, began putting policies into place that required free online access to research they funded. The NIH established its policy in 2008. As this happened, some universities followed suit, changing their open access guidelines from recommendations to requirements. Costs skyrocketCosts have been one driver of change. In recent years, as universities have sought to cut expenses, they have eyed journal subscription fees. Writing to all Harvard University faculty members in 2012, the Faculty Advisory Council to the Harvard Library said it could no longer sustain major periodical subscriptions. “Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,” the council wrote. “Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75 million. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.”Suber addressed this “journal pricing crisis” in a 2012 essay for the Open Society Foundation. “The system worked well until the prices of print journals began to rise faster than inflation in the 1970s. Prices have risen faster than inflation, and faster than library budgets, continuously for almost four decades. Even the wealthiest academic libraries are forced to make budget-driven cancellations every year. Harvard does so, for example, and recently told its faculty that journal prices are untenable and unsustainable,” he wrote. “One more piece of context: In 2010, Elsevier, the largest publisher of scholarly journals, reported a profit margin of 36 percent. In the same year, ExxonMobil reported only 28 percent.”Elsevier publishes Annals of Emergency Medicine.In 2012, during the same year that academics were crying foul over high journal subscription fees and how they were acting to limit access not just to the public but also increasingly to professors, a petition appeared on the White House’s We the People Web site. The online petition, which garnered in excess of 67,000 signatures, called on President Obama to extend the rules put into place by the NIH in 2008 to all federal agencies. The White House responded in February 2013, with a memorandum to federal agencies requiring them to ensure public access to research they fund within 12 months of publication.In reply to the petition, John Holdren, senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues, wrote that the White House had been concerned about open access for some time. “We know that scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators,” Holdren wrote. “Policies that mobilize these intellectual assets for reuse through broader access can accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote economic growth. That’s why the Obama Administration is committed to ensuring that the results of federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.”The mandate language in the 2014 omnibus bill is similar to the President’s memorandum of 2013 and strengthens the provisions by enacting them into legislation.Publishers have been taken aback by these developments. Chris Capot, director of Corporate Relations for Elsevier, deferred to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade association for US book publishers. In a statement issued in February, the AAP decried the manner in which the open access language was passed within the omnibus bill. “Hiding substantive legislation that affects US taxpayers on page 1020 of a 1500-page appropriations bill—without a chance for debate and in violation of Congressional rules—is bad process and leads to bad law,” the organization stated. “With this legislation, the proponents of one-size-fits-all, no-exemptions 12-month embargoes have shown their reluctance to expose the merits of their assumptions to the full debate possible in ‘regular order’ legislative process.” Costs have been one driver of change. In recent years, as universities have sought to cut expenses, they have eyed journal subscription fees. Writing to all Harvard University faculty members in 2012, the Faculty Advisory Council to the Harvard Library said it could no longer sustain major periodical subscriptions. “Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,” the council wrote. “Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75 million. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.” Suber addressed this “journal pricing crisis” in a 2012 essay for the Open Society Foundation. “The system worked well until the prices of print journals began to rise faster than inflation in the 1970s. Prices have risen faster than inflation, and faster than library budgets, continuously for almost four decades. Even the wealthiest academic libraries are forced to make budget-driven cancellations every year. Harvard does so, for example, and recently told its faculty that journal prices are untenable and unsustainable,” he wrote. “One more piece of context: In 2010, Elsevier, the largest publisher of scholarly journals, reported a profit margin of 36 percent. In the same year, ExxonMobil reported only 28 percent.” Elsevier publishes Annals of Emergency Medicine. In 2012, during the same year that academics were crying foul over high journal subscription fees and how they were acting to limit access not just to the public but also increasingly to professors, a petition appeared on the White House’s We the People Web site. The online petition, which garnered in excess of 67,000 signatures, called on President Obama to extend the rules put into place by the NIH in 2008 to all federal agencies. The White House responded in February 2013, with a memorandum to federal agencies requiring them to ensure public access to research they fund within 12 months of publication. In reply to the petition, John Holdren, senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues, wrote that the White House had been concerned about open access for some time. “We know that scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators,” Holdren wrote. “Policies that mobilize these intellectual assets for reuse through broader access can accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote economic growth. That’s why the Obama Administration is committed to ensuring that the results of federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.” The mandate language in the 2014 omnibus bill is similar to the President’s memorandum of 2013 and strengthens the provisions by enacting them into legislation. Publishers have been taken aback by these developments. Chris Capot, director of Corporate Relations for Elsevier, deferred to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade association for US book publishers. In a statement issued in February, the AAP decried the manner in which the open access language was passed within the omnibus bill. “Hiding substantive legislation that affects US taxpayers on page 1020 of a 1500-page appropriations bill—without a chance for debate and in violation of Congressional rules—is bad process and leads to bad law,” the organization stated. “With this legislation, the proponents of one-size-fits-all, no-exemptions 12-month embargoes have shown their reluctance to expose the merits of their assumptions to the full debate possible in ‘regular order’ legislative process.” Faster and FASTRThe AAP and publishers are also lobbying against the FASTR act, a proposal that would cut the embargo time from 12 to 6 months, as well as provide more generous terms of use, allowing scholars to reuse articles as long as the original authors and source are cited.“It’s not just enough for people to be able to read this research, but to use it,” said Neylon, the PLOS open access advocate. “We don’t want to live in a world where it’s look but don’t touch.”The FASTR Act, as of early March, had not advanced in the US House or Senate, but supporters were optimistic that it would move forward. It has a coalition of bipartisan supporters, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).“Breakthroughs in technology, science, medicine and dozens of other disciplines are made every year due to the billions in research funding provided by the American people,” Wyden said. “Making those findings available to all Americans is the best way to lead the next generation of discovery and innovation or create the next game-changing business. The FASTR act provides that access because taxpayer-funded research should never be hidden behind a pay wall.”The AAP criticized the FASTR Act, arguing that it would require federal agencies to undertake extensive, open-ended work already being performed successfully by the private sector, add significant ongoing costs to those agencies’ budgets, and undermine publishers’ efforts to provide access to high-quality peer-review research publications in a sustainable way.But open access advocates say FASTR-type reform is inevitable, considering the momentum behind the push to increase public access to federal research and the ways in which the Internet is changing publishing.“It’s inconceivable that we would fail to take advantage of the Internet,” Suber said. “It widens distribution and reduces cost at the same time.” The AAP and publishers are also lobbying against the FASTR act, a proposal that would cut the embargo time from 12 to 6 months, as well as provide more generous terms of use, allowing scholars to reuse articles as long as the original authors and source are cited. “It’s not just enough for people to be able to read this research, but to use it,” said Neylon, the PLOS open access advocate. “We don’t want to live in a world where it’s look but don’t touch.” The FASTR Act, as of early March, had not advanced in the US House or Senate, but supporters were optimistic that it would move forward. It has a coalition of bipartisan supporters, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). “Breakthroughs in technology, science, medicine and dozens of other disciplines are made every year due to the billions in research funding provided by the American people,” Wyden said. “Making those findings available to all Americans is the best way to lead the next generation of discovery and innovation or create the next game-changing business. The FASTR act provides that access because taxpayer-funded research should never be hidden behind a pay wall.” The AAP criticized the FASTR Act, arguing that it would require federal agencies to undertake extensive, open-ended work already being performed successfully by the private sector, add significant ongoing costs to those agencies’ budgets, and undermine publishers’ efforts to provide access to high-quality peer-review research publications in a sustainable way. But open access advocates say FASTR-type reform is inevitable, considering the momentum behind the push to increase public access to federal research and the ways in which the Internet is changing publishing. “It’s inconceivable that we would fail to take advantage of the Internet,” Suber said. “It widens distribution and reduces cost at the same time.” Beyond FASTRFASTR goes a long way, he said, with open licensing and a relatively short embargo. However, it covers only federally funded research, and Suber’s goal is for all kinds of research to be open access—every country, every field, privately and publicly funded both.“I think there’s harm in any embargo, especially in a field where timely notice of findings is important, like with medicine,” Suber said. “Publisher revenues don’t stack up against the life, health, and well-being of patients. But I do acknowledge that it’s difficult to get there politically right away.”Even so, the trend seems clear, both in the United States and abroad. In 2012, the British government accepted a report on open access by Dame Janet Finch that had a principal recommendation that publicly funded research move to a “gold” model, whereby article processing charges are paid upfront to cover the cost of publication, as PLOS and other open access journals do.Lobby efforts notwithstanding, publishers are now experimenting with alternatives to subscription fees. In a statement issued at the Finch report’s release, Elsevier stated, “The recommendations identify real opportunities, as well as risks, and how they are implemented will be key in ensuring sustainable models for scholarly communications.”In addition to the legislative action in the United States and abroad, this openness on the part of publishers to experiment with new models is the biggest sign that open access will continue to progress, Neylon said. “The big change in the last couple of years is that traditional publishers [are] seeing this as a viable opportunity for the future and increasingly something they now need to catch up on,” he said. “The direction of travel is now very clear.” FASTR goes a long way, he said, with open licensing and a relatively short embargo. However, it covers only federally funded research, and Suber’s goal is for all kinds of research to be open access—every country, every field, privately and publicly funded both. “I think there’s harm in any embargo, especially in a field where timely notice of findings is important, like with medicine,” Suber said. “Publisher revenues don’t stack up against the life, health, and well-being of patients. But I do acknowledge that it’s difficult to get there politically right away.” Even so, the trend seems clear, both in the United States and abroad. In 2012, the British government accepted a report on open access by Dame Janet Finch that had a principal recommendation that publicly funded research move to a “gold” model, whereby article processing charges are paid upfront to cover the cost of publication, as PLOS and other open access journals do. Lobby efforts notwithstanding, publishers are now experimenting with alternatives to subscription fees. In a statement issued at the Finch report’s release, Elsevier stated, “The recommendations identify real opportunities, as well as risks, and how they are implemented will be key in ensuring sustainable models for scholarly communications.” In addition to the legislative action in the United States and abroad, this openness on the part of publishers to experiment with new models is the biggest sign that open access will continue to progress, Neylon said. “The big change in the last couple of years is that traditional publishers [are] seeing this as a viable opportunity for the future and increasingly something they now need to catch up on,” he said. “The direction of travel is now very clear.”