RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

From: Ann Okerson <ann.okerson_at_yale.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:36:27 EDT

Paul, I believe those (below) are author charges for immediate OA via "open
choice" type arrangements, rather than fees to submit articles to NIH to
comply with the 12-month mandate?

To my inquiry the other day to the list about which publishers are planning
to submit to NIH as part of their regular publishing services, I've heard
already from about half a dozen who are lined up to do this, some larger,
some smaller. I've heard from others (society publishers) that they are
trying to work with NIH to submit articles, but it seems as if the NIH is
not smoothing the way, for various reasons. Only one publisher so far will
levy a (miniscule) service fee for submission to various mandating agencies.

Right now we have a kind of mess that needs time to sort out: trying to
achieve compliance for literally thousands of authors and articles in a
couple of months (since the mandate was announced in January) is a herculean
task, when the institutional underpinnings (the list of these is
substantial) are mostly not yet present. We have a situation in which
articles can be submitted by (1) authors, many of whom would rather just
have someone else do it, like the publishers -- btw, the NIH instructions
for authors are not as helpful as they could be; (2) the research
institutions, i.e., the ones that already have everything in place to do so;
or (3) the publishers. The potential for redundancy is huge and it is
wasteful. The publishers, most of whom are willing to help if given half a
chance, are the ones with the redacted articles... seem like the most
logical funnel to the NIH, if this can be worked out.

Wouldn't it be good if the NIH, the publishers, and the research
institutions would get into a room together and thrash this all out in an
sensible way? Ann Okerson


On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Gherman, Paul wrote:

> At Vanderbilt, our Medical Library has been doing significant work
> contacting publishers to find out what their policy and procedures are.
> One discovery is that some of them intend to charge authors between $900
> and $3,000 to submit articles to NIH. Some will allow for early posting,
> if the fee is paid.
>
> Paul
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of T Scott Plutchak
> Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 8:08 PM
> To: liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu; liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services
>
> Thank you, Ann, for suggesting this! I've been puzzling over the same
> thing. Might I suggest that it would also be useful if you could get
> samples of the messages that the publisher will send to the investigator
> to alert them that they need to go in to approve the submission? It'll be
> very helpful as we're preparing information pages for our folks if we can
> provide them with concrete examples of what to expect.
>
> Scott
>
> T. Scott Plutchak
> Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
> University of Alabama at Birmingham
Received on Thu Mar 20 2008 - 05:27:49 GMT