Astara March, Journals offer NIH wider research access, UPI, October 29, 2005. The gist of the proposal is for the NIH to link to articles at publishers' sites rather than host its own copies. Excerpt:
Martin Frank, DCPRinciples' coordinator, told United Press International the offer was made because the NIH in February 2005 requested that all scientists supported by the agency's funding send their articles to an NIH archive after the articles were accepted for publication in a scientific journal, but before the journal had a chance to copy-edit the work....Frank said DCPRinciples is concerned that problems will result from edited and unedited versions of the same research existing at the same time; that copyright violations will occur, because the process to ensure articles are not published before their embargo date is not strict enough, and that creating an unnecessary archive will divert funds from needed research. All of the participating non-profit journals offer free access to their contents, from right away to 12 months after publication, and these datelines would not change, but if the NIH accepts the organization's offer, only copy-edited articles would be released and there would be no problem with copyright issues....Dr. David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology and Information of the National Library of Medicine, which runs the NIH's PubMed and PubMed Central, said he was thrilled by the DCPRinciples proposal. "I think it's wonderful," Lipman told UPI. "What could be bad about it? There's no other side. Of course, we'd rather have the copy-edited article. Our only concern is to make our archive as large as possible and crosslink it in every way we can. Lipman called this "such an exciting time in science." He said cross-linking information provides "amazing" capabilities. "We want to make sure that scientists can not only find what they're looking for, but find that extra thing they didn't know about that allows new connections to be forged and new discoveries to take place," he said. "To make that easier, we are trying to add sidebars to our databases like the ones in Google and Amazon that suggest similar books or products of interest. We hope to suggest related data that might interest scientific investigators." Lipman said PubMed, which contains article abstracts, and PubMed Central, which contains full-text articles from both national and international journals, are currently unique in the world. He added, however, that the NIH has been approached by the governments of Britain, Italy and South Africa, all of whom want to create archives of their own and coordinate them with the one at NIH. "PubMed and PubMed Central host 1.5 million users and distribute 2.25 terabytes of data every day," he said. "DCPRinciples' offer will increase both those figures considerably. We welcome these new journals."
(PS: If I'm reading the two positions correctly, the DC Principles Coalition wants links instead of copies at the NIH, and David Lipman wants links as well as copies at the NIH. They're not yet on the same side.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/29/2005 08:37:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
