On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Matthew Cockerill wrote:
> PubMed Central has received funding to work towards scanning/OCRing the
> back issues of all the journals that are archived in PubMed Central...
> [I]f they agree to archive their content with PubMed Central, in return
> NIH will bear the cost of digitizing the back content.
> http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/scanning.html
> http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/pubinfo.html
This a wonderful (and sensible!) solution for those toll-access biomedical
journals that are prepared to convert to becoming open-access journals
now. (I assume the agreement is that back contents are scanned and
archived gratis if both current and back contents are made open-access.)
Now what is to be done, now, about (1) the non-biomedical journals and (2)
the journals that are not prepared to convert to to becoming open-access
journals now?
Where the incentive of offering the journal free retrodigitization and
archiving in exchange for converting to open-access is not sufficient
(and I fear it will not be sufficient, for fewer than 100 biomedical
journals are archived in PubMed Central now, out of a total of a least
2000 biomedical journals, perhaps closer to 4000, i.e., <5%) there is
still something that NIH, NSF, and other research funding agencies can
do to generate far more open-access content -- both current
and retrospective -- now:
In order to encourage authors to provide open access for their current
journal articles by self-archiving them, funding agencies can offer in
return to bear the cost of digitizing their back content!
And providing open access to the findings can also be made a condition
for research funding itself.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
Hypermail Archive:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Received on Fri Jan 02 2004 - 20:42:53 GMT
