Environment Health Perspectives (EHP) appears to be facing hard times. After nixing plans to privatize due to strong public opposition, the publication faces cuts in funding, forcing it to trim the news and commentary sections, and axe translations and free shipping to developing countries.
One of the first journals to go open-access, EHP is the peer-reviewed scientific publication of the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Currently, the journal, which has an impact factor of 5.34, costs $3.5 million per year to publish. NIEHS director David Schwartz declined to specify how much of this funding the journal was going to lose. "NIH has gone through two flat budget cycles with salaries increasing and cost of grants increasing," he said. "We have to look very closely at all of our expenditures. We are not singling out EHP."
Facing a tight budget, NIEHS floated a proposal last September to privatize EHP. Strong public opposition to this plan convinced the institute to continue publishing it, but in June, Schwartz announced that the journal would need to "reduce production costs during difficult budgetary times."...
Schwartz pointed out that there are other open-access journals "of equal or higher quality that are published for far less," such as the Journal of Clinical Investigation, which has an annual budget of $2.5 million and an impact factor of 15.1. "We really want to make sure that EHP is competitive with other journals both in terms of its cost as well as its impact," Schwartz said.
Environmental health researchers had mixed reactions to the proposed changes at EHP. "I'm delighted that they decided not to privatize it," said Philip Lee, former US Assistant Secretary of Health and current chair of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, a Bolinas, Calif-based nonprofit that promotes study of the links between human health and environmental factors. "The most important thing is to continue publishing the peer-reviewed scientific papers. If you have to cut somewhere, the news and commentary section is a logical place to cut," he said. "It is unfortunate that they have to eliminate the translation."...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/03/2006 04:39:00 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.
