Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, October 27, 2004

OA to past and future medical journals

JISC interviewed Robert Kiley yesterday about the Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project. Kiley is Head of Systems Strategy at the Wellcome [Trust] Library and the manager of the digitization project. Excerpt (from Kiley): "The aim of the project is to identify around 15 journals - which we consider historically significant - and digitise them in their entirety and make them freely available through PubMed Central. It isn’t just the archive, however, that we intend to make freely available – but also current and future issues published by participating publishers. In essence, Wellcome and JISC agree to fund the backfile conversion and in return the publishers (as a condition of participation) have to deposit their current issues into the PubMed Central archive. Research articles deposited within PubMed Central must be made freely within 12 months of publication, whilst all other content, such as editorials, letters, or reviews, must be made available within 3 years....The Wellcome trust has published two reports related to the Open Access debate....Trust-funded researchers are encouraged to publish in open access journals. Additional funding is made available to cover the author costs associated with this new business model. Hopefully, over the next few months, the Wellcome will further develop its OA policy. Encouraging researchers to move to the OA model is one thing, but I suspect that we need to be more pro-active. We are the UK's biggest funder of medical research [and] can help to influence change. It is interesting to note that the National Institutes of Health have drafted a consultation paper, which, if implemented, would require NIH grantees to deposit their research papers in PubMed Central. Such papers would then be freely available, within six months."