I believe that Peter Suber may have made an inadvertent but rather fundamental misinterpretation below. He infers that PNAS does not allow public self-archiving by the author until six months after publication except if the author plays the publication fee, but this is incorrect:
PNAS is one of the 92% of journals that have given their authors the green light for *immediate* self-archiving upon publication (i.e., making *publicly accessible immediately*): http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php (80% of them full-green for the final refereed draft -- the postprint -- 12% pale-green for the pre-acceptance preprint: PNAS is among the 80% postprint full-green journals). The misunderstanding is merely about *where* and *what* authors may self-archive (and, if you wish, *who* does the self-archiving): WHAT? Refereed, accepted final draft or publisher's PDF (both are "postprints")? WHERE? In the author's own institutional archive or in a central, 3rd-party archive like PubMed Central? WHO? Work is self-archived by the author or by PNAS? WHAT: The PNAS author may self-archive the postprint (which means make it publicly accessible, i.e., open access) immediately in his own institutional archive. He may even self-archive the PDF, though it is not clear (nor does it matter!) whether this may be the publisher's PDF or the author's own PDF version. In either case, a link must point to the official PNAS version, on PNAS's website. WHERE: The PNAS author may immediately "put" his postprint in a central archive like PubMed Central, but may not make it publicly accessible until 6 months after the publication date, unless the PNAS author fee is paid. Without the fee, the PubMed Central version may not be the publisher's PDF either. WHO: It is the PNAS author who self-archives in all of the above cases, but if the PNAS author fee is paid, PNAS itself will immediately make its own official version of the article publicly accessible (OA). I think this is the most benign and reasonable policy a responsible publisher can adopt -- and not one bit less than what is needed for 100% OA. But of course the ones who are holding us back from 100% OA are *definitely* not the publishers! It is the *authors*, only 10-20% of whom self-archive to date. And the authors have now made it clear in Alma Swan's international surveys that they will *not* self-archive (regardless of whether or not their journals are "green") until and unless their institutions and/or their funders *require* them to self-archive -- but in that case 79% they *will* self-archive and self-archive *willingly*! http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt http://cogprints.org/perl/search/simple?meta=&meta_merge=ALL&full=&full_merge=ALL&person=swan&person_merge=ALL&date=&_satisfyall=ALL&_order=byyear&_action_search=Search http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php In Open Access News, Peter Suber wrote: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_04_03_fosblogarchive.html#a111279844149784380 Nicholas Cozzarelli, Making research accessible: National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access and PNAS open access policies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 4, 2005. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0502201102v1?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=%22making+research+accessible%22&searchid=1112797486671_7795&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&journalcode=pnas Excerpt: 'PNAS complies with the NIH public access policy, and our journal policies extend public access even further. The NAS copyright policy gives authors permission to deposit their manuscripts in PMC upon acceptance. Authors can request public access to their manuscripts either 6 months after print publication or immediately upon publication if they have paid PNAS the open access fee. However, under the existing partnership between PNAS and PMC, authors can rely on PNAS to provide PMC with the official publisher version of their papers. The publisher version will, according to the new NIH policy, supersede any unformatted version deposited by the authors. PNAS automatically deposits the final, copy-edited and formatted version of all its content, regardless of funding, in PMC and makes it free at both PMC and PNAS just 6 months after publication....Although the NIH policy has been significantly scaled back from the one initially proposed in late 2004, I commend NIH Director Elias Zerhouni for taking an initial step toward a more accessible scientific literature, and I encourage him to do even more. The 2004 draft NIH policy indicated that NIH-funded authors would be required to provide a final version of their paper within 6 months of publication. The Council of the National Academy of Sciences unanimously endorsed this more comprehensive public access plan.' ([Peter Suber]: The PNAS is more progressive than other journals that have so far announced policies on NIH-funded authors. PNAS is to be congratulated for agreeing to deposit its own published version of the files in PMC, to do so without regard to NIH funding, and to call on NIH to restore the earlier and stronger version of the public-access policy. But PNAS is still insisting that NIH-funded authors not authorize public access immediately after publication unless they pay the PNAS processing fee. This contradicts the NIH request that grantees authorize public access as soon as possible after publication. It also creates the dilemma, as feared, in which authors must choose between their funder and their publisher.) Below is the evidence that this is a misunderstanding: http://romeo.eprints.org/search.php?t=national+academy http://www.pnas.org/misc/copyright.pdf "b. The author(s) reserves the right after publication of the WORK by PNAS... to post the WORK (in PDF) on the author's web page provided that a link to the article in PNAS Online is included "c. The author(s) reserves the right to post and update the WORK on e-print servers provided that PNAS-formatted files (HTML and PDF) are not used and that a link to the WORK in PNAS Online is included." 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 (1998-2005) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org 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-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/