Janet Coleman, "Open access would cost NIH roughly $2.5 million, agency's Lipman estimates," Washington Fax, September 27, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "Preliminary estimates of the cost of offering all NIH-funded research studies on the National Library of Medicines’s PubMed Central digital library are around $2.5 million and not the $100 million some critics have suggested, NLM Director Donald Lindberg, MD, said. NLM National Center for Biotechnology Information Director David Lipman 'worked up a budget of actual estimated costs…multiplied by everything under the sun and came up with $2.5 million,' Lindberg told the NLM Board of Regents Sept. 21....Lipman noted that 'there's been some very strong negative reaction...by the publishers' to NIH's open access proposal. The proposal, which provides free public access to the studies six months after publication, 'minimizes' any financial impact to the publishers by the six-month wait, Lipman noted....Publishers, however, have also argued that 'somehow this is a new government role, and the government should not be doing this.' That argument, Lipman said, is 'disconcerting because the government has been doing this, and libraries have been doing this, for over a century. NLM has had a mandate to archive the literature for over 150 years, and archiving is simply making sure there's access for the future. While they [use phrases] like "this is government as gatekeeper," in reality this is government and libraries just following through on the kind of commitment they have to archiving that's always existed.' "
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/28/2004 01:00:00 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.
