Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Student newspaper editorializes in favor of OA at NIH

Publicly funded research should be publicly accessible, editorial, The Collegiate Times, October 6, 2008. (The Collegiate Times is a student newspaper covering Virginia Tech.)

Comment. Unfortunately, several of the editorial's arguments are deeply flawed:
  • The biggest gaffe is confusing HR 6845, the Conyers bill (which we have covered previously), with supporting OA; in fact, the opposite is true.
  • The editorial also seems to assume that manuscripts subject to the NIH policy could not be published by commercial publishers. But there are extensive resources for authors on publishers' policies to allow authors to comply; a long list of journals even handles submission to PubMed Central on the author's behalf.