Alison McCook, Open access to US govt work urged, The Scientist, July 21, 2004. Excerpt: "A US House of Representatives committee has recommended that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provide free access to all research it funds and asked the NIH to submit a plan by December 1, 2004 for how to implement the new policy in fiscal year 2005....'This is the policy that many of us have been advocating for some time,' Peter Suber, from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., told The Scientist. 'It's an extraordinarily important step.' The response from publishers, however, was less positive. Barbara Meredith, vice president of Professional and Scholarly Publishing at the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told The Scientist that, if enacted, the NIH recommendation could undermine the sustainability of the publishing industry and exert a 'chilling effect' on NIH-funded authors by potentially limiting which journals accept their work....A similar system is already common in other subjects, like physics, [Robert] Campbell [of Blackwell] said, where researchers often publish in traditional journals then self-archive their papers. And they've found that papers listed in free archives often get more citations, which is ultimately good for the journal, he said. 'It seems to be working out,' Campbell told The Scientist. 'You could say it's a win–win situation.'...Suber argued that the US recommendation is 'perfectly compatible' with traditional business models, because it establishes a 6-month embargo before the research can be released, which is likely long enough for publishers to retain their subscription base. He added that last month, Elsevier...announced that authors could post a final version of their manuscript on a personal or institutional Web site....In addition, Richard K. Johnson, director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition [SPARC], said that journals that choose funding over quality will quickly develop a bad reputation. 'I can't see that this would change selection policies on the part of the journal,' he told The Scientist. Suber noted that the NIH is the largest science funder in the US federal government, and it is ultimately responsible to its own funder --the taxpayers, who deserve access to the research they paid for. 'The NIH does not work for the publishers. It works for the taxpayers,' he said."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/21/2004 02:16:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
