Nicholas Cozzarelli, Making research accessible: National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access and PNAS open access policies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 4, 2005. Excerpt: 'PNAS complies with the NIH public access policy, and our journal policies extend public access even further. The NAS copyright policy gives authors permission to deposit their manuscripts in PMC upon acceptance. Authors can request public access to their manuscripts either 6 months after print publication or immediately upon publication if they have paid PNAS the open access fee. However, under the existing partnership between PNAS and PMC, authors can rely on PNAS to provide PMC with the official publisher version of their papers. The publisher version will, according to the new NIH policy, supersede any unformatted version deposited by the authors. PNAS automatically deposits the final, copy-edited and formatted version of all its content, regardless of funding, in PMC and makes it free at both PMC and PNAS just 6 months after publication....Although the NIH policy has been significantly scaled back from the one initially proposed in late 2004, I commend NIH Director Elias Zerhouni for taking an initial step toward a more accessible scientific literature, and I encourage him to do even more. The 2004 draft NIH policy indicated that NIH-funded authors would be required to provide a final version of their paper within 6 months of publication. The Council of the National Academy of Sciences unanimously endorsed this more comprehensive public access plan.'
(PS: The PNAS is more progressive than other journals that have so far announced policies on NIH-funded authors. PNAS is to be congratulated for agreeing to deposit its own published version of the files in PMC, to do so without regard to NIH funding, and to call on NIH to restore the earlier and stronger version of the public-access policy. But PNAS is still insisting that NIH-funded authors not authorize public access immediately after publication unless they pay the PNAS processing fee. This contradicts the NIH request that grantees authorize public access as soon as possible after publication. It also creates the dilemma, as feared, in which authors must choose between their funder and their publisher.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/06/2005 10:25:00 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.
