James N. George and Sanford J. Shattil, Letter to authors and readers regarding the new NIH policy on public access, Blood, April 7, 2005. Excerpt: 'The ASH [American Society of Hematology] copyright transfer agreement will be modified to allow authors to deposit their accepted manuscripts in the PMC database if they choose to do so.... Authors submitting their accepted manuscript to PMC must specify that the manuscript can be made public no sooner than 1 year after final publication in Blood....ASH will further require that authors add the following disclaimer to the manuscript before sending it to PMC:
This author-produced electronic version of a manuscript accepted for publication in Blood has not yet been subjected to final copyediting, fact checking, and proofreading and is not the definitive publisher-authenticated version that will be published in Blood in print and online. The American Society of Hematology (ASH) and the Editors of Blood disclaim any responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in this early author-produced electronic version of the manuscript or in any other version derived from it by the National Institutes of Health or any other third party. The final publisher-authenticated version of the manuscript will be made publicly available on the Blood website 12 months after its publication in Blood.
....One of the myths promulgated by Public Access advocates is that online publishing does not cost any money.'
(PS: This is heel-dragging. The NIH request is for public access "as soon as possible" after publication. The Blood disclaimer is designed to frighten readers away from the public-access edition of the text even though it has been approved by Blood's peer-review process. BTW, no serious OA advocate ever said that online publishing, even OA publishing, was without costs. To say so at this late date, after this old misinformation has repeatedly been corrected, is to show that one is not paying attention.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/18/2005 05:32:00 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.
