This is a summary (from my own viewpoint) of the Washington meeting this weekend sponsored by American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST)....DASER 2 rehearsed some familiar developments, highlighted some of them, and brought out one potentially important new one (re. the NIH Public Access Policy)....[T]argeting the self-archiving of institutional peer-reviewed science/engineering article output, in order to maximise its visibility, usage and impact, rather than digital curation in general...was not the urgent priority [of the DASER meeting]. Indeed, there are good reasons for expecting that if the IR movement first puts its full weight and energy behind the focussed archiving of 100% of each institution's own OA IR target content, that will itself prove to be the most effective way to launch and advance the more general digital-curation agenda too....The only IRs that are well along the road toward toward 100% OA are the ones that also have an institutional self-archiving requirement. Without that, spontaneous OA self-archiving is hovering at about 5% - 15% globally. Which brings us to the last and newest development reported at DASER: The NIH Public Access Policy is flawed and failing -- its deposit rate is at about 2%, which is even below the global average for spontaneous self-archiving. But the good news is that NIH has realized this, and is planning to do something about it. The question is: what?...First, it is important to face the 3 flaws of the current NIH policy very forthrightly. Here they are, in order of severity: (1) Deposit is requested rather than required. (2) The request is not for immediate deposit but deposit within one year of publication. (3) The request is for deposit in PubMed Central (PMC) rather than in the author's own IR, from which PMC could harvest it....NIH can have what it wants -- 100% of its funded content in PMC within a year of publication -- while still requiring the author's final draft to be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, (preferably in the author's IR, harvestable by PMC, but absent that, directly deposited in PMC). That leaves only the question of how to set the access-privileges, and now those can be merely the subject of a (strong) request to set them to OA immediately upon deposit -- but with the option left open (sic) for the author to set access instead as restricted to institution-internal and PMC-harvestable (or, for PMC, PMC-administrative-only) if the author has reason to prefer that (the reason presumably being that the article is published in one of the 7% of journals that are not yet green on immediate OA self-archiving)....[T]his policy will immediately drive up NIH deposits from their current 2% level to 100%, because deposit will be a fulfilment condition on receiving the NIH grant. But no, it is not true that it will not generate immediate 100% OA. For it can generate that too, with a far smaller delay-loop than 12 months: something more of the order of a few minutes to 12 hours at most.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/06/2005 09:41:00 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.
