Rick Weiss, NIH Revises Plan for Quick, Free Access to Study Results, Washington Post, January 18, 2005. Excerpt: 'An ambitious proposal to make the results of federally funded medical research available to the public quickly and for free has been scaled back by the National Institutes of Health under pressure from scientific publishers, who argued that the plan would eat into their profits and harm the scientific enterprise they support. The initial plan, encouraged by Congress and hailed by patient advocacy groups, called for the results of NIH-funded research to be posted on a publicly accessible Web site within six months after they are published in a scientific journal. Most research results now are available only by subscription to the journal -- at a cost that often reaches into the thousands of dollars -- or on a pay-per-article basis that can cost $100 or more for two or three articles. In the final version of the plan, however, the recommended six-month deadline for posting results has been stretched to a year. That change has angered many advocates of public access, who have argued it isn't fair that taxpayers must either wait or ante up to see the results of research they have already paid for....NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni denied that the agency had buckled under industry pressure. Zerhouni said in a telephone interview that there are so many different kinds of publishers -- including many nonprofit publishers run by scientific societies, which reinvest their profits in scientific and educational endeavors -- that it did not make sense to demand a six-month release deadline for all. "I could not prove that a six-month deadline would not harm a significant part of the industry," Zerhouni said. "The new policy continues to call for release of information as soon as possible after publication, but it really leaves it in the hands of the scientists to decide when. What's important is that we're creating a precedent in which the agency that funds medical research is establishing a public database containing all its scientific output. I am certain that over time people will see this as a win-win." Some advocates for public access agreed that even a voluntary policy encouraging release within 12 months could result in more access than is available today, if the NIH makes clear to its grantees that it is serious about wanting them to participate. "The next year will tell if it's working. If a lot of people do it, it won't matter what the language is," said Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, which publishes scientific journals freely accessible to the public. "What's important is for NIH to convincingly say they're behind it."'
(PS: It's true that the policy Weiss describes is the policy that NIH would have announced on January 11, but it's too early to say whether this is the version that NIH will announce when it finally releases the language. It's true that this policy could encourage deposit and public access much earlier than six months, but it's also true that it would permit many NIH-funded research articles to be deposited much later than six months and some never to be deposited at all. Even if it is designed to preserve subscriptions at certain journals, it is not surgical and gives all publishers an out only needed by some. Moreover, it does buckle under industry pressure, putting publisher revenue ahead of public access to NIH-funded research. The six month embargo was already a compromise with the public interest. This policy gives publishers another concession without waiting for evidence that it was really necessary. There are good reasons to think that the original version of the policy would not have undercut journal subscriptions. Finally, it will put NIH-funded scientists in the painful and untenable position of having to choose between their funder and their publisher, a situation that the NIH could have avoided with an unambiguous mandate for OA to NIH-funded research. I'll have more to say about all of this in the February SOAN.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/18/2005 07:52:00 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.
