Open Access News

In a discussion about open access, an "embargo" is the time after an article is published in a subscription-based journal when online access is limited to subscribers.  Some non-OA journals never provide OA to their back issues, no matter how old, but others open up access after a "moving wall" of six months to three years.

In a discussion about science journalism, however, an "embargo" is the time after a publisher or researcher issues a press release when journalists are expected to keep the news to themselves.  In today's Inside Higher Ed, Vincent Kiernan has an extensive argument against embargoes in the second sense that occasionally touches on OA issues.  Part of his argument is that new online forms of digital communication are undermining the embargo system.  Excerpt:

[The embargo system] clearly does not enjoy total support in academe. Some scholarly societies — such as the American Geophysical Union and others — see no need for an embargo or believe that it does not operate in the public interest. Individual scholars also criticize the embargo arrangement. Some characterize it as a type of collusion that interferes with the stated purpose of scholarly communication. In the words of one science librarian: “Science is supposed to progress through rapid communication of results among scientists, but the embargo system is a barrier to this free exchange of information....”

The Internet will also weaken the embargo because it is transforming the process of scientific communication itself. Most traditional journals now offer online access to their articles, with the articles often posted long before the printed journal arrives in a scholar’s mailbox. Some journals have gone a step further, by publishing some or all of their articles online before they are published in print. The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, has posted on its Web site certain articles that, in the opinion of its editors, were in the public interest for rapid dissemination. Although the New England journal generally restricts online access to paid subscribers of the journal, anyone could read or download these “early release” articles. Science and Nature have also begun to post selected journal articles online, after they have completed peer review and editing but before they appear in print....

Scientists are also using the Web to archive and distribute preprints of their papers. With the advent of the Web, scholarly societies and even individual scholars have created databases on which authors can deposit electronic copies of their papers. Few journalists use the Web sites to plumb for news.  One who does is Tom Siegfried, science editor of The Dallas Morning News. “There’s plenty of stuff to report out there before they appear in journals,” he says. Every night, he says, he checks physics preprint servers, because the latest research is usually reported there first. “In physics nowadays the journals have become increasingly irrelevant,” he contends, with their role largely limited to serving as the archival copies of important papers and for proving records for tenure....

Even aside from these new forms of online scholarly communication, the Internet weakens the embargo system by providing new routes for embargoed information to leak into the public sphere....

The embargo system should be replaced with full and open disclosure of research results as soon as they are ready for public consumption, which generally would mean as soon as peer review is complete. Once a scholarly paper has been accepted by a journal, scientists and their institutions should be free to tell the world about it, and journalists should be free to report on it if they deem it newsworthy....It is time for science and medical journalists to break out of their dependence on journals as a source of science news, and it is time for scholarly societies to stop trying to shape the flow of news in a way that suits their own political ends.