One particular challenge of studying history is identifying the best starting point for a given story. It makes sense to start narratives of the American Civil War with the attacks on Fort Sumter, or South Carolina’s secession, or the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, or John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the several compromises to appease states where enslavement was legal. Any of these is a logical starting point, depending entirely on the historian’s treatment of the subject.
But there’s another reason for starting later than the “earliest” part of the story: you just didn’t find all the pieces.
In doing research for “The Promise of Public Access,” I landed on the work done at the National Institutes of Health as the first public access requirements in the United States. Indeed, I’d encountered many, many signs that pointed in that direction. More recently though, I’ve found that there was an earlier legislation introduced in 2003, almost precisely one year before the NIH proposed a recommendation for Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information. My initial reaction: my research has been scooped by the past.
But I quickly got over it. The 2003 legislation (H.R.2613, the Public Access to Science Act, or PASA) came out of the three statements and declarations— Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda— of open access in 2003, at a time when internet access spread rapidly. This bill focused on amending US copyright law as a way of ensuring public access to publicly funded work:
Any Federal department or agency that enters into a funding agreement with any person for the performance of scientific research substantially funded by the Federal Government shall include in the agreement a provision that states that copyright protection under this title is not available for any work produced pursuant to such research under the agreement. (H.R. 2613, 2013)
While this bill would have effectively put a great deal of research into the public domain, it also, as Peter Suber argued, was unnecessarily broad.
Regardless of this late discovery, I stand by my starting point at NIH in 2005. PASA appears to be a conversation starter, not a significant movement within public access policy efforts, as efforts to court co-sponsors a tepid response, and the Committee on the Judiciary’s referral to the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property was the last movement the proposed bill saw. Furthermore, its focus on copyright instead of public access offered an opening for future work to seize a public access-facing narrative, one which advocacy groups could adopt and shape.
Are there even earlier iterations of public access policy? There probably are, and they’ll be discovered and identified in the course of other historical research. When historians get this piece wrong, it doesn’t invalidate their story; it provides opportunity to enrich an expanding story.
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