One year on, advocates of free public access to scientific literature are calling a law that requires researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their manuscripts publicly available at the PubMed Central repository a success. At the same time, the measure continues to be challenged by a senior congressman and some publishers.
Since the legal requirement that NIH-funded researchers make their manuscripts publicly available after acceptance for journal publication came into effect last April, the number of articles being approved by their authors for processing by the repository has more than tripled. In March 2009, 6,425 such original articles were approved by their authors for processing; a year earlier, the number was 1,852 (see graph)....Author compliance "has been dramatically altered" by converting an "anaemic" voluntary policy into law, says former NIH director Harold Varmus, now president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a keen supporter of open-access initiatives.
But the policy still has opponents. "This so-called 'open access' policy was not subject to open hearings, open debate or open amendment in Congress," John Conyers (Democrat, Michigan), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote on The Huffington Post website last month (he declined to be interviewed for this article). In February, Conyers re-introduced a bill from the last congressional session that would amend US copyright law to forbid the NIH making funding conditional on manuscripts being publicly accessible. However, congressional observers say that the bill has little chance of going anywhere this year.
Open-access policies have caught on around the world in recent years. Britain's Wellcome Trust, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS), the European Research Council and many others have implemented similar mandates, including all seven UK research councils. Disease groups such as the high-profile US foundation Autism Speaks have done the same, as have the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
The reason that the policy has succeeded at the NIH "is that there has been cooperation — whether they wanted to [comply] or not — by grantees, by extramural staff, by the universities and by publishers", says David Lipman, director of the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland. He believes that the new requirement is at least partly responsible for the increased use of PubMed Central; there were approximately 550,000 articles downloaded from the site in March 2008, and 680,000 last month....
However, opposition to the law persists among some publishers. "What is being done by this policy is imposing a specific model of publication that we think the government has no business imposing," says Allan Adler, legal counsel for the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Washington DC. (Nature is a member of the AAP but cooperates with and supports the NIH on open access.)
Because of the delay of up to a year on NIH uploads to PubMed Central, it is difficult at this stage to gauge the impact of the policies on societies and other publishers that rely heavily on subscriptions for revenue....
Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an advocacy group in Washington DC with an open-access agenda, says that the consortium's members are reporting large-scale cuts in journal subscriptions. "But they are across disciplines, completely due to the economic meltdown and not the NIH policy," she adds.
But Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, says that "in an environment where access is readily available whether after 12 months or 6 months or immediately, the subscription model starts wobbling". Frank predicts that, as subscription revenues tank, publishers will be forced to levy stiff fees on authors for publishing....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/07/2009 09:45:00 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.
