Olaf Sparre Andersen, Editorial, Journal of General Physiology, April 25, 2005. Excerpt: 'Finally, I wish to comment briefly on the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy on enhancing public access to articles resulting from NIH-funded research, which takes effect May 2, 2005. Under this policy, which will affect more than half of the articles published in the Journal, the NIH requests that publications resulting from NIH-funded research be deposited by the authors in an archive at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). This policy raises a number of issues. Though one can only support the NIH's establishing an online archive, the archive will be incomplete because it will contain only articles resulting from NIH-funded research (published after May 2, 2005). It cannot therefore supplant the much larger archives that already are available through HighWire Press and similar resources. Indeed, the JGP and many other journals already have invested significantly in making their back issues available, and much of this information is not accessible through PubMed. The JGP provides free access to all back issues 12 months after publication. The Rockefeller University Press journals were among the first to institute such a policy. When the online archive became available, we maintained this practice, including the PDFs going back to Vol. 1, issue 1. This practice is being adopted by an increasing number of journals published by scientific societies and other not-for-profit publishers, which means that the most complete, and therefore most useful, archives will be provided by the journals through resources like HighWire. So, though it may be useful for NIH to maintain an electronic archive of publications resulting from NIH-funded research --after all, NIH receives paper copies of publications resulting from NIH-funded research, so why not provide the PDFs-- this archive will not be a major resource. Given this context, the proposed implementation of the new policy is likely to become a burden to both authors and readers, because NIH/NLM does not wish to receive PDFs of the published articles, only the accepted manuscripts (in precopyedited form). It therefore will be a burden on the authors to ensure that the articles in the NLM Archive are identical in content to the articles in the Journal's (or any other publisher's) web site. We can safely assume that glitches will occur, so it also will be a burden on the readers to ensure that they indeed are reading and referring to the article of record. The accompanying editorial by Mike Rossner [PS: blogged here on April 11], Editorial Director at The Rockefeller University Press and Managing Editor of the Journal of Cell Biology, describes some of the concerns that affect all of us, whether we are users or publishers of the scientific literature.'
(PS: One key correction. The NIH welcomes publisher PDFs. If publishers are willing to submit them, then NIH will replace the author's version with the publisher's version.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/26/2005 09:31:00 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.
