Jan Velterop, publisher and director of BioMed Central, has written an open letter (September 23, 2004) to Elias Zerhouni in support of the NIH open-access plan. Excerpt: "Our company...publishes a large number of NIH-funded research articles, all with full and immediate open access (ca. 15% - almost a thousand of the 6500 research articles we have published to date - indicate some form of NIH funding; all 6500 articles have been deposited immediately and in full in PubMedCentral)....We are impressed with and enthusiastic about your initiatives to bring open access to research literature closer to reality, not just for the sake of the tax paying public, but for scientific progress itself, which stands to benefit significantly. Since we publish research articles with open access and have done so for the last five years, we have come to conclude that there is a viable and feasible business model that ensures immediate open access, based on article processing charges payable by or on behalf of the author....All the open access articles we publish are deposited immediately in PubMed Central and in a number of other repositories in Europe as well, ensuring redundancy in accessibility....Our experience should be seen as a counter-argument to the reservations expressed by traditional publishers as to the economic sustainability of an open access publishing model. Any difficulties encountered by traditional publishers must be regarded as problems associated with the transition from the old model to an open access one, not as fundamental impediments....We also believe that immediate open access publishing is essential for the effective conduct of scientific research and provides substantial benefits for society as a whole. We fully recognize that these changes require adjustment on the part of traditional publishers and your proposal of a six months' initial delay of open access for published articles provides, in our opinion, a sufficient and appropriate help in this respect. We admire your initiative and will support it in any way we can."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/24/2004 10:38:00 AM.
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.
