In response to Stevan Harnad's comment below, I think it's important to
note that the revised NIH policy (as best we can determine it, since it
hasn't been officially announced yet) is actually closer to OA than the
policy that NIH vetted earlier. As Peter Suber noted in an earlier message
today, It gives the researcher control over when the article will be made
openly accessible, without having to request permission from the publisher.
Authors have the clear option to make their work openly accessible
immediately at the time of publication. (The policy also calls for
articles that are deposited to become openly accessible after 12 months, if
the author did not choose earlier open access.)
I think it remains to be seen if this will turn out to be better or worse
than the original NIH proposal that had a six-month delay, with earlier
open access only with permission of the publisher. It will be possible to
measure the outcome based on the percentage of research articles funded by
NIH that are deposited in PubMed Central and the average time from
publication to open access.
Ray English
Director of Libraries
Oberlin College
These developments are not a blow to the OA movement, they are merely a
challenge, a challenge that can and will be met in the following way:
(1) The NIH Proposal -- provisionally supported by the OA movement, will
now no longer be supported as it stands by the OA movement:
NIH's 6-12 month embargoed access is not Open Access but Back Access, and
if it had continued to be supported by the OA movement as a step toward
OA it would have had the exact opposite effect, locking in a 6-12-month
access delay for years to come, and providing a pretext to publishers
like Nature to Back-Slide from their prior policy of giving their authors
the green light to self-archive immediately -- a policy that had been
adopted to accommodate the expressed wishes of the research community to
maximise access -- to a policy of 6-month embargo and mere Back Access.
(2) Nature's Back-Sliding, like NIH's Back Access Policy, will be
portrayed as exactly what it is:
Nature's is a recent policy change adopted so as to minimize possible
risk to publishers' revenue streams even though all actual evidence is the
opposite: that toll-access and self-archiving can co-exist peacefully for
years to come, with no effect on journal revenue streams. Hence Nature's
back-sliding is entirely contrary to the interests of research and
researchers, minimizing a minimal hypothetical risk, against all evidence,
at the expense of maximal benefits to research and researchers for which
there is a growing body of evidence -- and done on the NIH-supplied
pretext of being in the service of research and researchers and a step
toward OA!
Stay tuned.
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
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m.html Post discussion to:
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UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
