At the Society for Neuroscience Meeting in November, I had the opportunity to talk with meeting
attendees at the Society’s booth on Publishers’ Row. We were located next to BioMed Central, a
publisher of many online author-pays open-access journals. From a few of the discussions I had, I
realized that I need to do a better job of publicizing the fact that ASPET’s primary research journals are open access. [ASPET = American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.] This was
explained in the June issue of The Pharmacologist, but it bears repeating.
All manuscripts accepted for publication since July 2005 for JPET, Molecular Pharmacology, and Drug Metabolism and Disposition
are freely accessible online. These “Fast Forward” online-ahead-of-print articles remain free after they are copyedited and formatted.
The formatted version becomes free 12 months after publication in an issue, but the manuscript version is free immediately upon
publication. This includes all articles—not just those funded by the NIH—so ASPET’s policy provides access exceeding that of the
NIH.
There are many variations on “open access” (OA), but the primary tenet of OA is that a work be freely accessible immediately upon
publication. That is exactly what ASPET is doing for its primary research articles.
We revised our copyright forms to allow authors to deposit NIH-funded research articles with PubMed Central. I encourage authors
to do this. ASPET asks only that authors set the release date for their articles at 12 months. The NIH system will automatically
calculate the actual calendar release date. It is based on publication data sent from the Society’s journals to PubMed. Authors just
have to set the time interval.
Although the NIH’s Enhanced Public Access Policy is voluntary, the low participation rate to date is fueling calls for mandatory
deposits with short or immediate release of content.
Why does ASPET ask for a 12-month release period at the NIH’s PubMed Central when articles are immediately available at the
journal Web sites? It’s all about hits. Librarians demand, and get, detailed usage statistics for the journals to which they subscribe. If
ASPET journal content is accessed at places other than the journal, hits go down, and there is less reason to maintain (or start) a
subscription.
Hits are also important to advertisers. Advertising income helps support ASPET’s publishing program. It isn’t a great deal of income
currently, but it is more than the Society’s journals can afford to lose, and we are working to make it grow. Hits diverted to journal
content at PubMed Central or anywhere else decrease our ability to attract and keep advertisers.
(PS: I covered this in the July SOAN but agree that it bears repeating. ASPET journals are the only ones I know that provide immediate free online access to the authors' peer-reviewed manuscripts and delayed free online access to the copy-edited versions.)
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.
