The Spring issue of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Bulletin is now online. This issue contains the AAP/PSP response to the NIH public-access policy (released separately on March 2 and blogged here with a few replies on the same day). The same issue contains a few additional reflections on the NIH policy by Marc Brodsky, Chairman of the AAP/PSP and Executive Director of the American Institute of Physics. Excerpt: 'A particularly distressful example of the lack of recognition of publishers' value-add is the National Institutes of Health policy of public access....The NIH plan for public access, in the guise of wanting to create a repository of all NIH funded research results --a repository that would be accessible on the Web without charge-- asks researchers not for reports to be directly sent to NIH for deposit, but rather requests the versions improved after peer review adn acceptance by a journal. We know that there are costs associated with the solicitation, processing, review, editing, marketing, distribution and archiving of journal articles. The NIH repository would take some of that value from publishers, essentially without compensation.'
(PS: Four quick replies. (1) "Guise"? Does Brodsky think the stated rationale for the NIH policy is just a pretext for hurting publishers? (2) The NIH acknowledges the value added by publishers, which is why it gives them up to a year to recover their costs before it releases the articles to the public on PubMed Central. In fact, the permissible delay is even longer, since participation is voluntary and needn't occur at all. Publishers who really hate the idea can refuse to publish NIH-funded research or ask their NIH-funded authors not to participate in the plan. (3) The NIH policy only causes publishers to lose revenue if it causes libraries to cancel subscriptions, and there are at least eight reasons to think it won't. (4) But for the sake of argument, suppose it does cause some libraries to cancel some subscriptions. Brodsky's alternative would take something of value from U.S. taxpayers without compensation, namely, access to the results of research for which they have already paid in three ways, namely, through the NIH research grant, through researcher salaries at public universities, and through subscription fees at public universities. Private-sector scientific publishers have been huge beneficiaries of public investment and the NIH policy is one small step to give the public something to show for that investment.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/08/2005 10:15:00 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.
