Stephen Pincock, Wellcome insists on open access, The Scientist, May 19, 2005. Excerpt: 'Britain's Wellcome Trust said today (May 19) that after October 1 of this year, all new grant recipients will be required to post any papers arising from the funded research in an open-access repository...."The Wellcome Trust policy is superior to the NIH policy in two key respects," said Peter Suber, a proponent of open access at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. "First, it's a requirement, not a request. Second, it does not permit delays longer than 6 months. Assuring early, widespread access to important research results is in the funder's interest, the researcher's interest, and the public interest." There may be a third respect in which the Wellcome policy is superior, Suber said via E-mail. "I'd have to see more details on the policy to be sure, [but] it appears that the Wellcome Trust is making deposit in PMC (or UK PMC) a simple condition of funding. If so, it's a contractual obligation of the grantee made prior to any copyright transfer agreement with a publisher. Hence, the grantee's publisher would have no standing to interfere." A spokesman for the trust confirmed that the new policy would make archiving within 6 months a grant condition. Roughly 3500 papers each year arise from Wellcome Trust–funded research, and the new policy means that after October 2006, all of those will be freely available within 6 months of publication. "If journals want to publish some of those… they'll have to accept that," he said. Stevan Harnad, an advocate of open access at the University of Southampton, UK, said there were problems with the Wellcome approach. "Wellcome's policy of requiring self-archiving is a great improvement over NIH's requesting it," Harnad said in an E-mail. "However, requiring it to be deposited in PMC or UKPMC is a big and unnecessary strategic mistake." Wellcome should have required researchers to deposit articles in a repository held by his own institution, from which it could be harvested by PubMed Central or its UK version, Harnad said....Harnad also said the Wellcome Trust should have required immediate deposit upon acceptance for publication. "Research progress is not based on 6 or 12 months delay in access to research findings," he said. Responding to this criticism, the Wellcome Trust spokesman told The Scientist: "We would prefer immediate release, but we're allowing a 6-month delay because we realise this is a big step and we have to approach it in a pragmatic way."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/19/2005 01:57:00 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.
