> Aug 5th 2004 From The Economist
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3061258
> If the Senate approves the recommendation, it will become law and the NIH
> will be required to deposit research funded by the agency into an online
> government archive called PubMed Central within six months of publication
> in any journal.
No, it is the NIH grant recipients, the articles' authors, who will
be required to deposit (self-archive) their articles. The NIH funds,
it doesn't publish or deposit...
> Another possibility is to generalise the House of Representatives'
> proposal for American medical research and allow the traditional journals
> a limited period of monopoly--say six months--after which they have to
> make all taxpayer-funded content available free online.
No, neither the US Government nor the NIH can require publishers to do
anything. Again, it is the grant-recipient on whom the conditions can
be imposed, as a requirement for receiving the funding. And what is being
recommended is to mandate that all peer-reviewed journal articles
arising from NIH-funded research must be made Open Access by their
authors by self-archiving within 6 months of publication.
Since 84% of journals have already given their green light to author
self-archiving, this mandate will merely exert some additional pressure
on the remaining 16% gray journals to hurry up and go green or risk
losing their NIH authors:
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.
But the real pressure of the mandate, however, is on the (funded) authors:
They must not only publish their NIH-funded research (as previously:
"Publish or Perish") but they must also self-archive it, to make it OA.
We already have the indications from Swan and Brown's (2004) JISC/OSI
author survey that grant recipients will willingly comply with such a
mandate. They asked authors:
"how they would feel if their employer or funding body required
them to deposit copies of their published articles in... [OA
archives]. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly..."
Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey
Report.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html
Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access
publishing. Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224.
http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/
Going on to sepcify that they should self-archive it centrally in
PubMed Central, however, is unnecessary over-management and
counter-productive. The mandate need merely be that all articles
must be made OA by self-archiving. The UK recommendations were
wiser in this respect. See:
"Re: Mandating OA around the corner?"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3873.html
"RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ALIGNING THE UK AND US RECOMMENDATIONS"
> At the moment, the entire open access literature is tiny--less than 1% of
> what is published according to the Public Library of Science. But if
> governments were to insist that the results of research they fund must be
> published in an open-access way, that would change completely. The days of
> huge profits would then be numbered. Prestige has its uses--and the
> open-access journals will, no doubt, establish a pecking-order among
> themselves fairly quickly. But for prestige at any price, time is probably
> up.
First, the proportion of the existing 24,000 peer-reviewed journals that
is gold (Open Access Journals) is probably closer to 5% than 1% overall
today, but this is still far, far too small to even contemplate mandating
that all funded authors must publish in that 5%!
http://www.doaj.org/
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html
But second, this article is again misconstruing the US recommendations, which
were to self-archive all journal articles, not to publish them in OA journals!
"Publish in an open-access way" is just a conflation of the two!
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm
Stevan Harnad
UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
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
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
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
Received on Fri Aug 06 2004 - 00:57:24 BST