Re-posted from Peter Suber's OA News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_12_18_fosblogarchive.html#113538573614656376
(with one query and one correction interpolated by S.H., and list of
prior pertinent AmSci threads added at the end.)
Will funder mandates and author attitudes kill embargoes?
Kate Worlock
Wellcome Trust: The End Of The Embargo?
Electronic Publishing Services
December 22, 2005
http://www.epsltd.com/clients/viewUpdateNotes.asp?updateNoteID=1810
(accessible only to subscribers).
Excerpt: OUP, Blackwell and Springer have changed their copyright
agreements with authors to allow immediate self-archiving of
Wellcome-funded research. What will agreements of this sort mean
for publisher embargo periods?...To date, attempts to request rather
than require
[SH: Was this not meant to be "require rather than request"? Unclear without
context: research community would prefer "require," publisher community would
prefer "request."]
researchers to self-archive have fallen on rather deaf ears,
so moves like this from Wellcome will be welcomed by open access
supporters. According to open access advocate Peter Suber, if all
of the NIH-funded researchers complied with the request to deposit
articles in PubMed Central, about 5,000 papers would be submitted
each month. In reality, only 1,878 articles were deposited between
May and September....From 1st October, Wellcome made it a condition
of funding that papers emanating from its grant awards be placed in
an open access repository. This reflects the Research Councils UK's
(RCUK) draft position statement, issued in September 2005,
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp
which also made article deposit a condition of funding....Meanwhile
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US established a
working group (PAWG) in May 2005 to review statistical evidence on
the impact of its policy and suggest any changes to the policy which
might further its goals...[A]t the group's November 15th meeting, it
recommended that the researchers be required rather than requested to
submit an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts
upon acceptance for publication to PubMed Central, and that delays or
embargoes imposed by publishers could be no longer than six months
(down from 12 months)....Another element was recently added to this
mix with Senator Joseph Lieberman's introduction of the CURES Act,
a bill which would mandate the deposit of articles within four
months of publication. There is evidence that authors do not always
obey embargo periods - Key Perspectives' research found that of the
eight primary research papers published in the first issue of Nature
Physics, seven were available on the web on the day of publication
despite a six month embargo.
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/index.html
At present most publishers require embargo periods of between six
and 12 months before an article may be placed in a repository,
[SH: This is *profoundly* incorrect: 93% of journals (75% of publishers)
give their green light to immediate self-archiving:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/ ]
but these recent announcements, plus the reality of researchers'
actions, will put pressure on this position. In the short term
publishers may choose to shorten their embargo periods and to use
this action as a bid to attract authors or to position themselves as
forwards-thinking. However, this type of competition cannot last long
- by the end of 2006 we may have witnessed the death of the embargo.
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Pertinent Prior Amsci Topic Threads:
"Copyright, Embargo, and the Ingelfinger Rule" (started Jan 2000)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0497.html
"Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0498.html
"What Provosts Need to Mandate" (started Dec 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3241.html
"Shulenburger on open access: so NEAR and yet so far"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3278.html
"Mandating OA Around the Corner?" (started Jul 2004)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3830.html
"New Self-Archiving FAQ: 32: Poisoned Apple"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3890.html
"Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" (started Jan 2005)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4308.html
"Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4313.html
Received on Sat Dec 24 2005 - 14:29:25 GMT