Jocelyn Kaiser, NIH Wants Public Access to Papers 'As Soon As Possible', Science Magazine, February 11, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'After collecting more than 6000 comments from both sides, Zerhouni on 3 February issued a final policy that states NIH will wait up to 1 year to post the papers, although it "strongly encourages" posting "as soon as possible." This "flexibility" will help protect publishers who believe earlier posting will harm revenues, he says. Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH deputy director for extramural research, expects that authors "will negotiate" the timing with the publisher rather than relying on the publisher's policy for when articles can be posted. NIH will not track compliance or make public access a condition of accepting an NIH grant, she says: "We have no plans to punish anybody who doesn't follow the policy."...Neither side seems satisfied. A group of nonprofit publishers called the D.C. Principles Coalition argues that the $2 million to $4 million per year that NIH estimates it will cost to post 60,000 papers is an unnecessary expense because most nonprofit journals already make papers publicly available in their own searchable archives after a year. "We're concerned about the waste of research dollars," says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, Maryland. Frank also argues that the plan would infringe journals' copyright, and it might not stand up to a legal challenge. For their part, open-access advocates aren't happy about the "voluntary" aspect or the 12-month timeframe. Whether articles will become available any sooner than they are now "is a big 'if,'" says Sharon Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance and an organizer of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access in Washington, D.C. The request that authors try to have their papers posted as soon as possible puts them "in the untenable position" of trying to please both NIH and their publishers, says the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. The only group that seems pleased with the wording is the Public Library of Science (PLoS) in San Francisco, California, which charges authors publication costs and then posts papers immediately upon publication. "We have influence here," says PLoS cofounder Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. "The journal may say 12 months, but the journal also wants [the] paper. Researchers are going to be voting with their feet." But that assertion assumes researchers will feel strongly enough to raise the issue with publishers. Virologist Craig Cameron of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, says he will likely rely on the publisher's existing policy even if it's 12 months. "With everything I have to think about on a daily basis, it's not something I would spend a lot of time on," he says.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/14/2005 09:26:00 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.
