To protect open access to publicly-funded research, Connecting for Health (part of the UK's National Health Service) has dropped BMJ in favor of Prodigy Knowledge as the distributor of its Clinical Knowledge Summaries. (Thanks to Ben Toth.) From today's announcement:
Connecting for Health have confirmed they have awarded a five year contract to provide Clinical Knowledge Summaries (CKS) to a consortium comprising the Sowerby Centre for Health Informatics, at Newcastle Ltd (SCHIN) and international medical publishers EBSCO.
As E-Health Insider Primary Care exclusively revealed last week NHS Connecting for Health ended its agreement with BMJ Publishing Group on 30 September after the BMJ refused to hand over the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of its material generated during the contract.
CfH began procuring for a new supplier of CKS in May 2006 with an advertisement in the Official Journal of the European Union, where they made it clear that it was essential that the Department of Health owned the IPR of any material used during the contract, which is paid for by taxpayers.
In a statement they said: “This will ensure that, at the end of the contract, the NHS will have continuing rights to the content developed during the course of the contract rather than be left with nothing if the supplier owned IPR, as was the case with the Clinical Evidence contract.” ...
The consortium will be providing GPs and clinicians with Prodigy Knowledge, an updated source of clinical knowledge designed to support healthcare professionals and patients, in managing the common conditions generally seen in primary and first-contact care.
Comment: Kudos to CfH for enforcing the public's right to OA. I'm trying to learn more about what happened here, since BMJ is a pioneer of OA and certainly able to understand the terms of a contract. Will the CfH take steps to regain the rights to material generated during the five year contract with BMJ? Is there some question about what the contract actually required?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/09/2006 09:48:00 AM.
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.
