JIM GILES Wellcome Trust endorses public archive for biomedical research.
[LONDON] The
Wellcome Trust, Europe's largest research charity, has become the
latest grant-giving body to throw down the gauntlet to academic
publishers in the debate over open-access literature. All papers reporting the results of research funded by the trust
will in future have to be placed in a central public archive within six
months of publication, the organization said on 4 November. The move
could bring the trust into conflict with publishers, who often hold
exclusive rights on the use of such material. This in turn could
restrict researchers' choices about which journals they publish in. But advocates of open access suffered a setback on 8 November when
the British government rejected proposals for reforms favouring open
access. The proposals had been made in July by the House of Commons
Science and Technology Committee (see Nature 430, 390; 2004). In particular, the government rejected the committee's call that it
should instruct its research councils to provide money so that
scientists could meet author charges in open-access journals. "The
government does not think it should intervene to support one model or
another," it said in a formal response to the committee report, adding
that it was "also not convinced that the 'author-pays' model is
inherently superior to the current model". But the Wellcome Trust says that it may now establish a European
version of PubMed Central, a US database of biomedical research.
Wellcome officials are already talking about this possibility to the US
National Library of Medicine, which runs PubMed Central, but have not
set a date for creating such an archive. The trust is preparing to set
aside 1–2% of its total annual spend of Researchers funded by Wellcome could find that the new rules create
some difficult choices. Some publishing houses, such as Elsevier, which
publishes more than 1,800 journals including Cell and The
Lancet,
do not currently allow any version of a paper they have published to be
placed on a public archive other than on websites restricted to the
author's research institution. "This will put publishers and researchers in a difficult position,"
acknowledges Robert Terry, a senior policy adviser at the trust's
London headquarters. But Terry believes that journals will modify their
policies to allow papers to go to central archives. He points out that
the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering putting
similar requirements on the research that it funds (see Nature 431, 115; 2004). "It would be
quite a strange journal that didn't include research funded by the NIH
and the Wellcome Trust," he adds. A spokeswoman for Elsevier said that the company was watching the
NIH and Wellcome developments with interest but would not comment on
possible changes to its copyright rules. Annette Thomas, managing
director of Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which publishes Nature,
says that important questions about the archive, such as who would take
responsibility for the accuracy of the submissions, need to addressed
before NPG can take a position on the plan. |
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