Here are some comments on OA by Jeff Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. The occasion was a conference (March 31 - April 1, 2005) sponsored by the Association of Health Care Journalists. I'm quoting from the transcript, but video is also available. '[I]n 2003...SARS came along. We put our articles up for free on the web as soon as we could possibly get them out. And I know they do this at both the JAMA and the Annals, when there’s something that the public needs to know about today as opposed to tomorrow; we put it out there free. We're not trying to make 10 bucks by selling the articles. We want that information out there so it can be used. SARS was a case in point; Women's Health Initiative is another case in point. As journal editors we say if you need to know these data now, they are up there free....Now [PLoS is] planning to charge $1,500 a paper, but a journal like ours or the Annals or JAMA, we get hundreds of papers for one that we may publish. We put a lot of work into stuff that we don't publish. We figured it would cost about $30,000 a paper we charge the authors to put it up, which seems a little unreasonable. So we can have a journal that doesn't put a lot of work into the peer review process, do it cheaply. We can get the stuff up online. But the economics here are a little concerning because the author is paying too. And in our capitalist society one of our basic tenants is who pays the fiddler calls the tune. If the author is paying to have their article published, we generally call that advertising....[On the NIH policy:] And we want to know who is accessing our content. We'll serve it up free on our website. I'm sure all the other journals feel the same way. You find one of our articles, you come to our website, you can have it free six months later. No problem....Now there's a conflict of interest of here because [the NIH] signs the checks that the authors use to do the research that allow them to write the paper. So to say that [grantees are] doing this voluntarily is a little crazy because you'd be biting the hand that feeds you....I'm a...citizen of the United States and my country bought Yellowstone National Park. But when I show up at Yellowstone National Park, they still charge me $20 to get in. Now my country may have paid for the research, but if there's a value added, and we think the journals an add value, it's okay to pay a small fee, $9.95 for the first six months in our journal....Do we want unedited manuscripts out in the public domain?...Do we want multiple versions out there?...So finally is open access a problem? I don't think so and I think that Harold [Varmus] in 1999 had a problem; he solved it. But it's no longer a problem....And these stories about the mother whose daughter had cancer and she couldn't get the vital information to save her daughter's life is totally bogus. If you want that information, you can get it at a very nominal charge. But what we want is information that's available but correct. That's where the editors, at least I stand, and other editors with us. Open access is important. Open access to the right information.' (Thanks to Michael Rogawski.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/19/2005 09:24:00 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.
