Last year, a huge scuffle broke out over a National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan to ask grantees to submit their accepted papers to a free archive. Open-access advocates hailed the move,whereas journals said they would be bankrupted (Science, 3 September 2004, p. 1386). But 2 months after the policy went into effect, most researchers seem to be ignoring it. As of 2 July, NIH’s PubMed Central had received only about 300 papers, a mere 3% of the 11,000 expected if all NIH grantees complied.Two-thirds of authors said NIH could post their paper immediately upon publication, and the rest asked for a delay. Timothy Hays of NIH’s extramural research office says the figure is “not surprising” because many grantees are waiting for their institutions to tell them how to respond to the new policy and for guidance from journals. But Sharon F.Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance, says it may be time for NIH to rethink things. “If we were … investing in a new business, and we saw early performance returns at the rate of 3%,we would not wait to reexamine our strategy,” she says.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/01/2005 12:07:00 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.
