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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.

Yes, yes it is.

Take as an example The Heritage Foundation’s “Radical OSTP Proposal Would Undermine American Research and Sacrifice American Intellectual Property,” a response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s 2020 request for information on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research.

Central to Heritage’s opposition is that the OSTP proposal “would give away U.S. intellectual property.” A national public access policy, they argue, would undermine U.S. copyright, giving foreign competitors access to research conducted through U.S. government offices.

However, this opposition retreads territory familiar to folks who’ve worked in the open access space. Primarily, Heritage conflates intellectual property with availability, arguing that anyone who can access an article may use it in any way they choose. Neither public access not open access offers carte blanche for using another’s intellectual property; instead, both these modes of publishing maintain that authors retain their copyright regardless of the article’s availability. Readers of public access articles cannot claim the work as their own, and they cannot republish those articles in other venues without author permission.

The second open access myth is around the economics of publishing. Heritage claims that public access undermines the investment that publishers have made in developing peer review networks that support a robust research ecosystem. Instead, publishers have made significant profits through public access by shifting production costs from readers who pay for subscriptions to authors who pay “article processing charges” to make the research publicly available. Earning reports show that open access and public access are not causing publisher any sort of financial pain.

A third area of concern in these articles is simply a misrepresentation of access to scholarly research. It is true that a public access policy would make freely available these research articles to anyone with an internet connection, regardless of their citizenship. However, articles published in subscription journals are still available regardless of citizenship— as long as the reader or their institution pays the fees. A national public access policy, whether developed by executive order, executive memorandum, or act of Congress, would not significantly change the demographics of readership. Baseless fears of international (i.e., non-U.S.) researchers co-opting U.S. research willfully ignore the efforts and outcomes of robust international research communities, as well as researchers whose small labs have minimal access to such strong research programs. A focus on international competition minimizes the significant progress made through international cooperation.

Dispelling myths of open access and public access has been and continues to be an important part of scholarly communication work. Opposition to public access is rooted in these myths, and the work done by proponents of a national public access policy has been a strong effort to weaken the positions of the fearmongers.

As public access policies go into effect across federal agencies in the United States, it’s worth some time to examine the history of public access policy in the country. It’s not a long history— the first such policy entered the Congressional record only in 2004— but it’s a complex history.

There are two particularly noteworthy elements to this history. First is the gradual expansion of public access policy. It started at the National Institutes of Health in 2004 as an opt-in recommendation, becoming a requirement in 2008. In 2013, public access became a requirement at a few federal agencies, operating at $100 million in research expenditures. And finally, it expanded to all federal agencies in 2022.

The second part is the location of these actions. The NIH mandate in 2008 came through Congress, though it had already been practiced in many areas of health science research. The other mandates came through the executive branch, specifically the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) under John Holdren in 2013 and Alondra Nelson in 2022. Importantly, all efforts to codify public access policy languished in committee.

On this site, there are many opportunities to further explore the history of public access policy in the United States, and there are resources to help researchers, librarians, and administrators understand how we got to this point and what’s required now. To this end, there are some important sub-pages:

1. Primary Resources contains a list of all proposed legislation for a national public access policy, along with executive memoranda through OSTP. It will be updated as additional proposals are introduced.
2. Resources is a place for researchers, librarians, and administrators to access helpful information in navigating the requirements of federal funding agencies. This, too, will be updated as new resources are developed.
3. Timeline of Public Access in the United States is exactly as the title says— a visual representation of public access history in the United States.

This project stemmed from research into the history of public access, in Science and Public Policy (Oxford University Press): “The Promise of Public Access: a recent history” DOI: 10.1093/scipol/scaf075