One nugget before getting to the NIH discussion: 'The biggest boost [in usage] by far came from being indexed by Google in the summer of 2004. Earlier that year ASPET signed an agreement allowing Google to crawl the journal sites so they can be fully indexed. Google quickly outpaced PubMed and Medline in referring users to ASPET's journals. This has been the case for other scientific journals as well. Likewise, Yahoo refers more users to the Society's journals than the NIH sites.'
On the NIH policy: 'ASPET makes all of its online journal content freely available after 12 months. The Society has not made a decision as to how soon accepted manuscripts from its journals may be released through PMC. An obvious concern for ASPET and many other societies and publishers is the effect that free access through the NIH will have on subscription sales. There are several hotly contested points of view on this topic. Some feel that free access will have no impact. Their reasoning is that libraries must have full journal content, not just the NIH-funded research. And, the final publisher's version is desired --sometimes necessary-- because of errors caught in copyediting. Some journals already release manuscripts after a short or no delay. On the other hand, the library community has been vociferous in supporting open access in general and the NIH policy specifically. Some librarians see it as a solution to rising subscription prices and clearly think they will be able to cut subscriptions. If a significant number of articles from a journal are free immediately at PubMed Central, a library may decide that it can use inter-library loan or document delivery to get the remaining content and do without a subscription. Many society publishers like ASPET feel that the NIH policy is unnecessary because our journals make their content freely available after 12 months. The NIH policy creates a duplicate system that takes money away from research to serve needs that are already being met by journals such as ASPET's....Neither those for or against the NIH policy can guarantee the outcomes they predict. We can be sure, however, that if subscription cancellations accelerate, there will be no way to replace that income and no going back.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/09/2005 05:14:00 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.
