Open Access News

Andrea Gawrylewski, Publishers ask NIH to delay open access, The Scientist, March 21, 2008.  Excerpt:

At the National Institutes of Health open meeting on the new public access mandate yesterday (March 20), publishers continued to criticize the plan and called for the agency to delay implementing it....

NIH director Elias Zerhouni said the agency was "all ears" to recommendations of how to best move forward with implementing the policy....

Jack Ochs, from the American Chemical Society, gave the first five-minute comment. He started out by saying that a brief meeting was no substitute for the formal comments on rulemaking process like the one the NIH held when they were implementing the voluntary submission program in 2005. He was the first of several to call a halt to implementing the mandate so the details could be worked out.

Several publishers said that the NIH's plan for PubMed Central to be a massive, searchable database for research papers duplicates what publishers have been investing in for years....Martin Frank from the American Physiological Society said that the NIH is using taxpayer dollars to become another publisher. "Scientific literature is available only due to the money already spent by publishers," he said....

Even some of the public access supporters who gave a comment had concerns regarding the new policy. They wanted to know how the NIH will ensure compliance to the mandate, who will have access to the manuscripts submitted to PubMed Central, and how authors are to know publication dates of their papers so far ahead of time.

At the end of the meeting [NIH Director of extramural research, Norka Ruiz Bravo] reiterated that the NIH will be taking all comments into consideration and that the NIH has issued a request for information open from March 31 to May 31, where the public can submit further comment. The agency will be issuing its report on these comments no later than September 30....

Comments

• "Several publishers said that the NIH's plan for PubMed Central to be a massive, searchable database for research papers duplicates what publishers have been investing in for years."  One huge difference:  NIH will make the contents freely available to everyone within 12 months of publication.  If free online access were routinely provided by publishers, the NIH policy would probably never have been adopted. 
• "Martin Frank from the American Physiological Society said that the NIH is using taxpayer dollars to become another publisher."  One huge difference:  The NIH will not perform peer review or tell journals how to conduct peer review.  It's not replacing publishers but improving access to peer-reviewed literature --because publishers haven't done so themselves.
• Martin Frank said, "Scientific literature is available only due to the money already spent by publishers."  True, but then there's the money already spent by taxpayers on the underlying research (not to mention the taxpayer money already spent by public universities on researcher salaries and journal subscriptions).  The public funds spent on an NIH research project can be hundreds of times greater than the cost of publishing the resulting papers in peer-reviewed journals.  Publishers who want to repeal the OA mandate have a one-sided view of added value and no view at all of the public interest.  Publishers who want a compromise fail to recognize that the current policy is already a compromise.  It only applies to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscripts, not to the published version, and it permits an embargo period of up to 12 months. 

Update (3/25/08).  Also see the article in Library Journal Academic Newswire.