Janet Coleman, "NIH Public Access Policy Gives Authors Posting Discretion Up To 12 Months", Washington Fax, January 21, 2005 (the article is not online). Excerpt: 'NIH's final policy on public access will instruct authors to designate when their manuscripts on agency-funded research should be posted on NIH's PubMed Central digital library following journal publication, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, MD, said. "We're going to tell the scientists, 'look, you have the right to specify when your paper can be made public by NIH,'" Zerhouni said in an interview Jan. 19. "You can tell us right away, three months, six months, nine months....If you scientists feel it is going to damage your society or scientific publishing or your relationship with your publishers, then you can go up to 12 months. "We expect 12 months to be the exception, not the rule," Zerhouni insisted. The posting timeframe is a shift from NIH's September draft policy on public access, which called for posting manuscripts on PMC six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal, or sooner if the publisher agreed. The six-month period was a central concern raised by scientific societies and publishers, who argued...that some journals, particularly those that publish infrequently, might be put out of business. NIH's inability to quantify the potential economic impact on industry ultimately led to the agency's current proposal for a more flexible posting timeframe. The choice, Zerhouni explained, was whether to take two or three years to do an economic analysis with the danger that "you can never really get to the answers" or eliminate to the six-month deadline. "What we also realized was that perhaps what we needed to do was disconnect the date from the policy because people are missing the point here, in my view. The fundamental breakthrough of this policy is…not the timing, it's the fact that we're creating for the first time the precedent and the right for a federal agency to have a venue or pathway for its scientists to publish and give access to the public," Zerhouni asserted....The final public access policy is expected to take effect in the spring.'
(PS: This is a serious and disappointing retreat by the NIH. The delay in public access will be a delay in research advances. The delay puts the private interests of publishers ahead of the public interest in medical research. The only plus is that authors no longer need their publisher's consent to deposit their articles less than six months after publication. However, authors will be torn between their funder's expectation for early deposit and their publisher's demand for later deposit. We don't yet know how often authors will align themselves with their funder. But we do know that this will be a painful and risky dilemma for authors and that the NIH could have made it unnecessary. Finally, see our previous posting: Elias Zerhouni's new boss, Michael Leavitt, was urged at his Senate confirmation hearings yesterday to scrap the new 12-month period and restore the shorter, six-month embargo. We won't know whether this will have an effect until the NIH policy is finally released. I'll have more to say in the February issue of SOAN.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/21/2005 03:19:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
