Jerald L. Schnoor, Open access and you, Environmental Science and Technology, March 15, 2005. An editorial. Excerpt: 'A new freedom is brewing. It's not mentioned in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but it's increasingly recognized as vital --the freedom of unrestricted access to scientific information on the Internet. Open access is a juggernaut that is permanently reshaping the landscape for scientific publishing, and it will change the way you publish and search for scientific information. The principle is simple. If the government pays for research reported in scientific journals, then the public should have free and open access to the results....Beginning May 2, authors whose research is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) are requested to submit their published research articles to the National Library of Medicine within one year of publication. PubMed Central is the open archive of published papers and is supported by NIH. Some have criticized NIH for creating its own archive at a cost of $2–4 million per year instead of simply directing the public to the original journals' websites, but these original journals have not all released their content. Others criticize the voluntary nature of the system, which places authors in the difficult position of negotiating between the journal and NIH about the timing of the deposit. Still, PubMed Central relies on a flourishing publishing industry to process the original articles, and this industry may be undermined when its content is accessible on PubMed Central for free....We need a "catch-and-release" system whereby the publisher owns the exclusive rights to the paper for an appropriate time --generally considered as 6–18 months. Then, the paper is reincarnated into the public domain and deposited by the author to a designated online archive. It could be the original journal archive. Articles could then be reused without legal complications, and full text and figures could be "data mined" for new correlations and discoveries. Imagine searching full-text databases just like the genomic sequences in GenBank. As scientists and authors, we want as many people as possible to read, use, and cite our research. And for this, we rely on a stable publishing industry. Publishers need to find a business model by which they can capture enough revenue in the short time that the paper resides with them. That may require charging authors and institutions and/or increasing fees for current content. Change is the only thing that is certain. Right now, the American Chemical Society, home of ES&T, is considering making all back issues of its journals freely available after an appropriate period. At ES&T, we strongly encourage this policy. It will result in better dissemination of ideas, increase our readership, and, hopefully, improve environmental science and technology. Open access is an irresistible idea.'
(PS: I don't want to nitpick a friendly editorial, but I have two quick responses. First on the possibility that the NIH policy will "undermine" the system of journals that provide peer review: There are at least eight reasons to think that the NIH policy will not undermine journal subscriptions. In any case, it will certainly not undermine OA journals, which can provide peer review of equal rigor. Second, on the catch-and-release proposal: Authors need the right of immediate self-archiving. Schnoor's proposal seems to permit a six month embargo, even if it doesn't require it. In addition, after a subscription-based journal has recovered its costs, it's enough to let rights revert to the author and provide OA to the back issues. Assigning the articles to the public domain is not strictly necessary. But with these revisions, the idea of temporary transfers of rights from authors to publishers is a promising one that deserves a closer look.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/18/2005 09:10:00 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.
