The American Chemical Society -- one of the declining number of"gray" publishers of the 8% of journals that still have not given their green light to author self-archiving http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php -- has announced that it has officially cloned and adopted the worst-case scenario of the NIH Public Access Policy:
>American Chemical Society broadens author-directed article access >http://acsjl-media.com/lrd1_AAI3QgAACzMB > > >Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from >NIH-Funded Research (Notice Number NOT-OD-05-022/ >http://acsjl-media.com/lrd0_AAI3QgAACzMB ) Back Access 12 months late is too little, too late to benefit research access, usage or progress. The ACS 12-month access-delay would lock in a pure, needless and counterproductive loss to research access, usage and progress. This is just another untoward (and unintended) side-effect of the flawed NIH Public Access Policy. NIH has unwittingly given ACS a pretext for feeling and portraying itself as if it were civic-minded in not giving its green light to immediate author self-archiving, whereas in fact this is merely an attempt to lock in Back Access for many years to come, by locking out Open Access -- under the guise of assisting it! The definitive cure for all this dithering will be the adoption of institutional self-archiving policies. Providing OA does not depend on publishers; it never did. It depends entirely upon researchers, their institutions and their research funders. Bref: Publishers need not provide OA themselves, but they should give their own authors the green light to do so if they wish. (Not that the green light is necessary either, legally or practically: it is merely helpful *psychologically,* to disinhibit sluggish and timid authors!) "Putting the Berlin Principle into Practice: The Southampton Keystroke Policy" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin3-harnad.html http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/program.html Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: "Shulenburger on open access: so NEAR and yet so far" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3277.html "Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" http://makeashorterlink.com/?F2E01227A http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4307.html "Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding" http://makeashorterlink.com/?M3115427A http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4312.html "Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society)" (1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0471.html ACS meeting comments on e-prints (2000) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0619.html ACS Chemical & Engineering News Editorial: "The Open-Access Myth" (2004) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3675.html "Royal Society of Chemistry is Now Green (Green reaches 92%)" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3938.html "Are Chemical Journals Too Expensive and Inaccessible?" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3948.html "Google's Scholarly Search Service and Institutional OA Self-Archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4175.html "American Psychological Association (APA) and Open Access" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4179.html Stevan Harnad