Q: Tell us a little about your Manuscript Deposition Service. How is this service expected to help authors meet funder and institutional mandates?
A: Our Manuscript Deposition Service makes it quick and simple for authors to comply with funder and institutional mandates, by depositing manuscripts to open-access repositories on their behalf.
Authors opt in to the service via a simple form during our usual submission process. This has the advantage that the author will have a lot of the necessary information to hand, and can be assured that this requirement will be taken care of. On acceptance, NPG automatically deposits the accepted version of the author's manuscript to their specified repository, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication. All the author should need to do is validate the submission with the repository when asked to do so.
We currently offer this service for depositions to PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central on about 40 of our journals. We're working to expand this to all NPG journals that publish research content.
Also, NPG's self-archiving policy allows the author's final version to be made freely accessible six months after publication, so authors can be confident that they can comply with the requirements of all major funders, even for repositories to which we can't currently deposit on their behalf.
Q: Talking of open access journals or free content on the web, how much is this a challenge to you.
A: Open access is just another aspect of online publishing that makes it so much more multi-faceted and interesting than print publishing. Whether it's a threat or an opportunity depends on how individual organisations respond. Some publishers have certainly tried to resist it, but the common claim that publishers in general have been resistant (at least since I came into the industry just over a decade ago) is a long way from the truth. Some publishers have embraced it while others haven't, though there's an increasing realisation that it's not going away. (Incidentally, I think much the same can be said about the attitudes of scientists themselves).
It's also important to recognise that there are multiple routes to open access. A lot of attention has been given to author-pays journal publishing, but this model isn't currently sustainable for journals with high rejection rates and heavy editorial input, so at best we're going to end up with a mixture of business models, not all of them open access. This is what we see in the industry today, and it's what we have at NPG too. Some of our journals publish papers that are free to readers, paid for by author fees, but most of them continue to charge subscription fees because that's the only model that's currently sustainable for high-end journals. Personally, I wish it were otherwise.
The most likely way in which content from across the full range of different journals will be made available for free is through funder-mandated self-archiving, most notably the NIH's PubMed Central project and its British counterpart, UKPMC. Eventually these kinds of initiatives are likely to result in the majority of research content becoming freely available in some form 6-12 months after publication in a journal. Nature has been a strong supporter of these initiatives -- see my earlier comments about our Manuscript Deposition Service....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/19/2008 01:47:00 PM.
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.
