Lila Guterman, NIH Reportedly Is Weakening Its Plan for Free Access to Journal Articles, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 19, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'Just weeks after its director defended a controversial draft policy for providing free access to scientific literature, the National Institutes of Health appears to be softening its stance. A newspaper report on Tuesday said that the NIH's final policy, which is not yet public, would ask scientists to post their papers online a year after they were published by a journal, instead of just six months....An NIH spokesman would neither confirm nor deny a change in the policy, and said an announcement of the final policy would come soon....Some critics of the NIH's draft plan, including nonprofit research groups that depend on their journals for revenue, were glad to hear of the reported change. "It probably minimizes the potential damage to subscriptions," said Peter Banks, who is in charge of the American Diabetes Association's publications program. "I'm hoping it's true."...[Martin] Frank also worried that [even] the 12-month delay would lull nonprofit publishers into accepting the policy, and that the NIH could later shorten the delay. He said that taking legal action to stop the new policy from taking effect was "an option." Advocates of increasing public access to research results decried the weakening of the policy. "The six-month embargo was already a compromise," said Peter Suber, director the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that advocates the free flow of information. "If extending the embargo was necessary to save the subscription base of some journals, it certainly wasn't necessary for all journals, and yet [the NIH is] giving all journals the out."...Another critic assailed the NIH's extension of the delay and its making voluntary whether to post on PubMed Central. "I think they've punted," said Richard K. Johnson, director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. "Rather than NIH acting within the scope of its ability to act on this, they've thrown it to the researchers to make the decision."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/19/2005 01:53:00 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.
