Open Access News

(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.)

Immunome Research will encompass all aspects of immunology research that integrate traditional laboratory research with the latest technologies, including genomics, bioinformatics and mathematical modelling. Immunome Research is a journal of the International Immunomics Society (IIMMS). The journal aims to provide a focal point for the field of Immunomics, which includes the sub-speciality immunoinformatics, as well as the application of large-scale genomics to the immune system. Rapidly expanding areas of particular interest include prediction of MHC-peptide binding, mathematical modelling of viral/host interactions, and the use of gene expression arrays to model immune system pathways.

(PS: A few quick replies. First, this formulation focuses on OA journals and overlooks OA archives. Second, OA journals make their content freely available from the start. Only non-OA journals consider compromises like free online access after a six month embargo. Third, librarians are remarkable in their support for OA, and their future support will complement the efforts of other stakeholders, but the only parties indispensable for OA are authors. Fourth, "mainstream abstracting and indexing services" are less important for OA content than for conventional content, since OA content is crawled and indexed by an ever-expanding array of increasingly-sophisticated tools for full-text searching, mining, summarizing, querying, linking, alerting, and many other forms of processing and analysis.)

1. Whether the change from an "opt-in" to an "opt-out" system of copyright alters a "traditional contour[] of copyright," requiring "further First Amendment scrutiny" under the standard established in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186, 123 S. Ct. 769 (2003).
2. Whether the current term of copyright is so long as to be effectively perpetual.
3. Whether a statute that extends copyright terms that have not, and will not, pass through a filter of renewal violates the "limited Times" condition of Article I, sec. 8, cl. 8 ("the Progress Clause").

For more background and updates, see the page on the case maintained by the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

(PS: One important correction. The NIH permits a year's delay but does not "want" a year's delay. On the contrary, at the same time that it permits a longer delay, it will encourage authors to deposit their articles as soon as possible. Rick Johnson got it just right: The NIH shouldn't have permitted a longer delay, but if authors do deposit their work in PubMed Central sooner than six months after publication, then the result will be positive.)

(PS: This is the longest and most detailed of the journal editorials about OA I've seen recently. Although it uncritically repeats some canards --e.g. that OA journals compromise on peer review [reply], that the current system works well [reply], and that OA is incompatible with print [reply]-- it tries harder to be judicious than most other journal editorials skeptical about OA.)

(PS: OA opposes price barriers to access, not profit. BioMed Central, for example, is a for-profit OA publisher. OA opposes priced journal literature, not the publishers that provide priced journal literature. If they adopt OA models, they will be welcomed as allies. OA does not require publisher setbacks.)

Molecular pain is a relatively new and rapidly expanding research field that represents an advanced step from conventional pain research. Molecular pain research addresses physiological and pathological pain at the cellular, subcellular and molecular levels. These studies integrate pain research with molecular biology, genomics, proteomics, modern electrophysiology and neurobiology. The field of molecular pain research has been rapidly expanding in the recent years, and has great promise for the identification of highly specific and effective targets for the treatment of intractable pain. Although several existing journals publish articles on classical pain research, none are specifically dedicated to molecular pain research. Therefore, a new journal focused on molecular pain research is needed. Molecular Pain, an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal, will provide a forum for molecular pain scientists to communicate their research findings in a targeted manner to others in this important and growing field.

(PS: It's true that the policy Weiss describes is the policy that NIH would have announced on January 11, but it's too early to say whether this is the version that NIH will announce when it finally releases the language. It's true that this policy could encourage deposit and public access much earlier than six months, but it's also true that it would permit many NIH-funded research articles to be deposited much later than six months and some never to be deposited at all. Even if it is designed to preserve subscriptions at certain journals, it is not surgical and gives all publishers an out only needed by some. Moreover, it does buckle under industry pressure, putting publisher revenue ahead of public access to NIH-funded research. The six month embargo was already a compromise with the public interest. This policy gives publishers another concession without waiting for evidence that it was really necessary. There are good reasons to think that the original version of the policy would not have undercut journal subscriptions. Finally, it will put NIH-funded scientists in the painful and untenable position of having to choose between their funder and their publisher, a situation that the NIH could have avoided with an unambiguous mandate for OA to NIH-funded research. I'll have more to say about all of this in the February SOAN.)

(PS: Four quick replies. Sloppy scholarship with digital sources doesn't reflect on digitization any more than sloppy scholarship with print sources reflects on print. I'm also over 50 and I like both OA and my print button. What's the problem? There are many reasons to think that NIH public-access policy will not harm subscription-based journals, whether their publishers are for-profit or non-profit. Finally, the NIH policy did have its period of public comment, two weeks longer than the usual 60 days, and it elicited over 6,000 comments.)

(PS: This may be the single most uninformed article about OA I've ever read.)

(PS: Thanks to retroactive extensions of the term of copyright, nothing like this can happen in the United States until 2019.)