The NIH progress report to Congress on the public-access policy is now online (dated January 2006). It's a scanned image, so I can't cut and paste an excerpt and I don't have time to rekey the important parts. Here are the highlights.
The number of articles deposited in PubMed Central under the policy from its launch on May 2, 2005, to December 31, 2005 (namely, 1,636), the total number of articles covered by the policy that should have been deposited in the same period (43,000), and the embargo periods requested by authors (60% authorized release immediately upon publication, 23% requested embargoes of 10-12 months, and 17% requested something in between). The compliance rate is a miserable 3.8%. "Lack of awareness does not appear to be the primary reason for the low submission rate."
PMC usage increases as its size increases.
NIH sees no evidence that its public-access policy "has had any impact on peer review".
The cost of handling submissions and administering the policy was $1 million for fiscal 2005. If the compliance rate grows to 50%, the cost would grow to $2 million/year. If the compliance rate were 100% (65,000 articles/year), the cost would be $3.5 million/year.
The report describes the NIH's outreach efforts to educate stakeholders about the policy: NIH staff, grantees, grantee institutions, and the journals where grantees publish their work.
Finally, the report describes the November 15, 2005, decision of the Public Access Working group (PAWG). Ten out of 11 members wanted grantees to deposit the final, published versions of their articles. Nine of 11 voted to mandate deposit and public access. Eight of 11 voted to shorten the permissible delay to six months, with some flexibility for rare exceptions. (The minutes of the PAWG meeting are also online.) The report says nothing about the PAWG recommendations except that "[t]he NLM Board of Regents will consider the opinions of the Working Group at its next meeting."
Update. The NLM Board of Regents meeting mentioned in the final sentence took place on February 7-8, 2006. In the meeting, the Board endorsed the PAWG recommendations. For details, see my blog posting later on February 16, above.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/16/2006 09:27:00 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.
