The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has expressed support for Springer's Open Choice program whereby articles are — if accepted for publication after a process of rigorous peer-review — immediately published with full open access and deposited in repositories such as PubMed Central, at a flat-rate fee per article of $3,000. Springer's Open Choice programme applies to all its journals.
HHMI has a strong commitment to ensuring public access to original research articles. Beginning with papers submitted for publication after January 1, 2008, HHMI will require its scientists to publish their original research articles in journals that allow the articles and supplementary materials to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication.
HHMI is the largest private funder of biomedical research in the U.S. and commits more than $500 million a year for research and distributes $80 million in grant support for science education.
HHMI investigators already publish a significant number of research articles in open access journals or in journals with open access options. Under the new policy, HHMI will pay up to $2,000 in open access charges per article with the balance coming from laboratory budgets or other sources....
In Springer Open Choice, authors are not required to transfer their copyright to Springer; instead, these articles are published under a Creative Commons License....
Comment. I applaud this step. As I said about HHMI's similar deal with BMC:
Unlike the agreement with Elsevier, in which HHMI paid for green OA, HHMI is here paying for gold OA. I’ve long recommended that funders who can afford to do so should offer to pay publication fees when their grantees choose to publish their research in fee-based OA journals.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/27/2007 11:49:00 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.
