Mike Rossner, The NIH policy on enhancing public access to publications resulting from NIH-funded research : Can we streamline the process for our authors?Journal of Cell Biology, March 28, 2005. Excerpt: 'We are strongly in favor of the establishment of an archive of NIH-funded research; in fact, we would prefer to see a truly complete, electronic archive of all the scientific literature established, with limited access controls that allow publishers to recoup their costs. This is where we believe the NLM should direct their efforts. To ensure that the final, published version of a paper is what is included in such an archive, we are willing to give the NLM all of our content as pdf files. This would prevent any problems of quality control related to html interpretation across platforms. We have been told by the NLM, however, that they want our complete html content, because they want to build a full-text search engine. It is a useless duplication of effort for the NLM to host html (or SGML, or XML, or whatever comes next) simply for the purpose of full-text searching --Google and other search engines are currently indexing our full text, and already far more users arrive at our content via Google than via PubMed. If, despite the duplication, the NLM goes ahead and develops a full-text search engine, we have offered to allow them to index our text by crawling our website. In addition, the text content of pdf files can be indexed for searching, which is how full-text searches of our content from before 1997 are done on our website. The current NIH policy is a misguided attempt to achieve laudable goals. We hope they can be convinced to reconsider how to achieve those goals.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/11/2005 01:13:00 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.
