Peter Baxter, Interesting times in medical publishing, Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, February 2005. An editorial. The journal offers only this abstract free online, at least so far: ' "Publish and be damned", the Duke of Wellington's reported retort to attempted blackmail in a kiss-and-tell saga two hundred years ago, has acquired a Don't in front of it in the modern academic world. However, how research should be published has become a controversial topic. In the US the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have decided that any work they support should be made freely available after six months. The subtext is eventual immediate availability, which can already happen if authors publish in some electronic fora. If so, subscription journals could disappear. It is suggested that, instead of the existing system, authors should pay to publish their work, at a generally quoted cost of US$1500 per article. Future NIH grants would include publication costs. Other large grant giving bodies in the UK and elsewhere may follow the NIH example.'
(PS: Three quick responses: (1) The editorial was published too early to take into account the last-minute weakening of the NIH policy. Not only is the six-month embargo history, but the permissible delay grew to at least twelve months rather than shrinking to zero. (2) The NIH already allowed, and still allows, its grantees to pay OA journal processing fees with grant funds. If Baxter is proposing to replace NIH-encouraged OA archiving with NIH-funded OA journal publication --which isn't clear--, that would be a mistake. It would limit the body of free online NIH-funded research to the subset that could be published by OA journals. It would also limit NIH-funded authors to a subset of journals, which is not now the case. (3) The full text of Baxter's editorial is free online at Find Articles. Note to Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology: If you allow Find Articles to offer free online full text, why not do it yourself with your own look and feel, your own links, and your own ability to monitor downloads?)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/19/2005 12:07:00 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.
