Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
The (anonymized) query below concerning Wiley's NIH policy is in error, so I am preceding it by a correction: (1) The new Wiley NIH policy below is specific to Wiley's compliance with the NIH public access policy, which invites NIH fundees to deposit their NIH-funded papers in PubMed Central (PMC) -- a third party central archive (i.e., neither the author's institutional archive nor the publisher's archive). (2) The Wiley NIH policy is to deposit the author's paper in PMC on the author's behalf. (3) The Wiley NIH policy has no bearing whatsoever on 1st-party self-archiving by the author in the author's own institutional repository; Wiley's policy on immediate author/institution self-archiving is and continues to be green: http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers/45.html http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php#45 Just as it would be a good idea if publishers were to refrain from speculating about doomsday scenarios (about catastrophic cancellations as a result of self-archiving) for which there is zero positive evidence and against which there is a good deal of negative evidence, http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3777.html it would be a good idea if librarians and OA advocates were to refrain from speculating about sinister scenarios involving NIH-inspired publisher back-sliding on self-archiving policy, for which there is and continues to be exactly *one* single isolated example -- Nature Publishing Group -- and even that merely a case of back-sliding from a postprint full-green policy to a preprint pale-green policy (which is of next to no consequence, as one can have 100% OA with corrected preprints). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4312.html http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32.Poisoned Author/institution self-archiving is and always was the 100% certain path to 100% OA. 100% self-archiving is (and always was) completely within the hands of the research community. And it is unstoppable. The fact that we are not there yet is definitely not the fault of publishers but of the sluggishness and slow-wittedness of the research community (which is also it's primary beneficiary). But it does look as if we are coming to our senses at last... The RCUK policy may prove to be the decisive step. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4611.html Stevan Harnad List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:12:15 +0100 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org From: [identity deleted] Subject: Wiley Publishers deposit in PMC Stevan This could be a way of publishers encouraging authors not to deposit - ie the publisher will do it, but creates an embargo because it appears that the publisher deposited article will not be available until 12 months after publication? Do you know if other publishers are following this policy? [identity deleted] The National Institutes of Health Public Access Initiative Response and Guidance for Journal Editors and Contributors Notice of Wiley's Compliance with NIH Grants and Contracts Policy Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has requested that its grantees submit copies of manuscripts upon their acceptance for publication to PubMedCentral (PMC), a repository housed within the National Library of Medicine.. On behalf of our authors who are also NIH grantees, Wiley will deposit in PMC at the same time that the article is published in our journal the peer-reviewed version of the author's manuscript. Wiley will stipulate that the manuscript may be available for public access in PMC 12 months after the date of publication. By assuming this responsibility, Wiley will ensure that authors are in compliance with the NIH request, as well as make certain the appropriate version of the manuscript is deposited. When an NIH grant is mentioned in the Acknowledgments or any other section of a manuscript, Wiley will assume that the author wants the manuscript deposited into PMC, unless the author states otherwise. The author can communicate this via email, or a note in the manuscript. The version of the manuscript that Wiley sends to PMC will be the accepted version, i.e. the version that the journal's Editor-in-Chief sends to Wiley for publication. Wiley will notify the author when the manuscript has been sent to PMC. Because Wiley is taking the responsibility for sending the manuscripts to PMC, in order to ensure an orderly process, authors should not deposit Wiley articles to PMC themselves. Authors should not make corrections to their Wiley-deposited manuscripts in PMC. Wiley reserves the right to change or rescind this policy. For further information, please get in touch with your editorial contact at Wiley, or see the http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/NIH Policy on Public Access.
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Thanks for your comments. In [ ] are replies below. A general point: even if the subscription overlay is not the best or most economically viable model, this does not mean that some other overlay design is not desirable. Also, my critique of the faults of the green approach, as expressed in various venues, does not ride on the viability of the subscription overlay model. One thing is pretty clear so far: librarians as a group are not likely to be enamored with this approach, which (along with the other considerations thus far expressed) is one reason why it is unlikely to succeed. The NIH and Nature events have signalled the final death-knell of the green approach, in any case, imho. Brian Simboli Tim Brody wrote: Brian Simboli wrote: (Worries that people will merely use OAIster or google to bring up all the articles for a given issue can be circumvented if the journal title is suppressed in the metadata for the freely available article.) This wouldn't help citation linking, which is already pretty patchy. Anyway, I think you'll find autonomous services already get around missing metadata through triangulation! [Re. citation linking: SFX works for access to both for pay (part of subscriptions) and not for pay articles. Can you elaborate here? I guess I'm not seeing the argument. If the argument is that citation linking would only work for access to the material as linked off the subscription table of contents, then that seems no problem. No different from the way things are done now, right? Re. triangulation, I take it the argument here is that an autonomous service could perhaps do this and artificially create a table of contents that would compete commercially with the subscription-based table of contents. However, some possible rejoinders are: i. suppress not just the journal title, but also most other information that would enable the triangulation. Perhaps just the author's name would be left? ii. again, I've argued that institutions may be willing to pay for value-added features of the publisher's website, not just access to table of contents. Even if an autonomous service did what you mention, there is no guarantee that they could provide these value-added services in quite the way the publisher would. iii. even if there were these autonomous services doing triangulation, would institutions rather pay them than pay for the direct access from the publisher's table of content? It would get down to pricing, and as I've argued, the subscription overlay model would force pricing to be low, by its design. It would not be a commercial enterprise, but rather a cost recovery one.] Interestingly, aren't the physics societies right now partially committed to something like a de facto subscription overlay model, in that many physics peer-reviewed postprints are being archived on arxiv.org and are therefore freely accessible? Why shouldn't the physics socieities then just directly link to the postprints at arxiv.org, obviating the need for authors to engage in duplicative, afterglow self-archiving efforts? Or is it the case that, if only a portion of articles published by the physics societies have self-archived counterparts on arxiv, the tipping point has not been reached yet where it becomes not in their economic interest to allow access to a free copy (via author self-archiving)? I believe that some physics societies will accept *submissions* from a pre-print server, but it's not the case that the publisher version gets pushed back onto an e-print server (unless the author has permission and does that himself, which I haven't noticed). [This is just an argument for the subscription overlay publisher working closely with the likes of arxiv, to push the publisher version onto the e-print server. The model may require changes in the way things have been done in the past, but these changes don't seem overwhelmingly daunting.] Searching for referee in arXiv finds only ~1000 matches, referee or corrected only 37,000. So, perhaps: 1) Physicists don't need to make corrections (so only the pre-print is arXived) 2) Only the post-refereed version gets archived 3) Physicists don't provide a comment when they do update to reflect referee's comments [Can you elaborate on how this constitutes a critique of the subscription overlay model?] See also Alma Swan's presentation http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ppts/swan.ppt). All the best, Tim. Alma Swan wrote: In recent days there has been some discussion as to whether NIH's retreat may in fact be due to a fear of adverse effects on the scholarly publishing industry if immediate self-archiving were to be mandated by NIH for its grantholders (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-05.htm). And, certainly, the Nature Publishing Group appears to be changing its policy on self-archiving. It is not easy to follow NPG's arguments so far because they are rather complicated, but it appears to be suggesting that it is aiding Open Access
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Brian Simboli wrote: One thing is pretty clear so far: librarians as a group are not likely to be enamored with this approach, which... is one reason why it is unlikely to succeed. The NIH and Nature events have signalled the final death-knell of the green approach... I am not sure how representative this view is of the librarian community, but I suggest that everyone stay tuned to see whether Brian's optimistic prediction proves true. In the meantime, I would add only that what matters is not whether or not (some) librarians (or publishers) are enamored of the green self-archiving approach, but whether or not the actual content-providers -- the researchers, plus their employers and funders -- are. So I suggest that speculations about hypothetical overlay journals as well as impending death be redirected to some of the other lists currently discussing these matters, leaving the American Scientist Open Access Forum to focus on evidence-based practical strategy for reaching 100% OA as soon as possible: Re: New policy of combining one-on-one postings (April 2004) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3721.html The American Scientist Open Access Forum is the oldest and most active of the Open Access (OA) lists. It is the locus where most of the topics being widely discussed today first arose -- as attested to by the long-standing subject-threads attached to them. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html I would like to propose that henceforth OA-to-OA postings that are not likely to be of interest to policy-makers at universities, research institutions, and research-funding agencies might better be directed to one of the other OA lists... Let us try to reserve the American Scientist Open Access Forum for substantive policy-relevant matters with a view to hastening and facilitating OA worldwide. Stevan Harnad
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Brian Simboli wrote: (Worries that people will merely use OAIster or google to bring up all the articles for a given issue can be circumvented if the journal title is suppressed in the metadata for the freely available article.) This wouldn't help citation linking, which is already pretty patchy. Anyway, I think you'll find autonomous services already get around missing metadata through triangulation! Interestingly, aren't the physics societies right now partially committed to something like a de facto subscription overlay model, in that many physics peer-reviewed postprints are being archived on arxiv.org and are therefore freely accessible? Why shouldn't the physics socieities then just directly link to the postprints at arxiv.org, obviating the need for authors to engage in duplicative, afterglow self-archiving efforts? Or is it the case that, if only a portion of articles published by the physics societies have self-archived counterparts on arxiv, the tipping point has not been reached yet where it becomes not in their economic interest to allow access to a free copy (via author self-archiving)? I believe that some physics societies will accept *submissions* from a pre-print server, but it's not the case that the publisher version gets pushed back onto an e-print server (unless the author has permission and does that himself, which I haven't noticed). Searching for referee in arXiv finds only ~1000 matches, referee or corrected only 37,000. So, perhaps: 1) Physicists don't need to make corrections (so only the pre-print is arXived) 2) Only the post-refereed version gets archived 3) Physicists don't provide a comment when they do update to reflect referee's comments See also Alma Swan's presentation http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ppts/swan.ppt). All the best, Tim. Alma Swan wrote: In recent days there has been some discussion as to whether NIH's retreat may in fact be due to a fear of adverse effects on the scholarly publishing industry if immediate self-archiving were to be mandated by NIH for its grantholders (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-05.htm). And, certainly, the Nature Publishing Group appears to be changing its policy on self-archiving. It is not easy to follow NPG's arguments so far because they are rather complicated, but it appears to be suggesting that it is aiding Open Access by moving from allowing immediate self-archiving by authors in their institutional repositories to allowing it only after a period of six months post-publication of an article. The logic of this is not at all clear. It would be very helpful if NPG would clearly explain the causal inferences and its policy but one has to infer that NPG has apprehensions about a possible adverse effect of self-archiving upon its business. Many publishers, particularly some learned societies, share these apprehensions and that is perfectly understandable if they base their view of the future on imaginings rather than on actual evidence. In the case of self-archiving, there is absolutely no need for this sort of self-terrorising. The experiment has been done and the results are clear-cut. Fourteen years ago the arXiv was set up (www.arxiv.org). It houses preprints and postprints in physics, predominantly in the areas of high-energy physics, condensed matter physics and astrophysics. It is the norm for researchers in these areas to post their articles either before or after refereeing to this repository. In 2003, the 421 physics journals listed in ISI's SCI published a total of 116,723 articles. The arXiv receives approximately 42,000 articles per annum, meaning that around a third of all physics research articles appear not only in journals but ALSO in the arXiv. Have physics publishers gone to the wall in the last 14 years? No, and not only have they continued to survive, they have also continued to thrive. I have recently asked questions about this of two of the big learned society publishers in physics, the American Physical Society in the US and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd in the UK. There are two salient points to note: 1. Neither can identify any loss of subscriptions to the journals that they publish as a result of the arXiv. 2. Subscription attrition, where it is occurring, is the same in the areas that match the coverage of the arXiv as it is across any other areas of physics that these societies publish in. Both societies, moreover, see actual benefits for their publishing operations arising from the existence of arXiv. The APS has cooperated closely with arXiv including establishing a mirror (jointly with Brookhaven National Laboratory)... We also revised our copyright statement to be explicitly in favor of author self-archiving. These efforts strengthened (rather than weakened) Physical Review D [an APS journal that covers high-energy physics] ...I would say it is likely we maintained subscriptions to Physical Review D that we may otherwise have lost if we hadn't been so
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Can someone please explain this NIH override, what it applies to, and when it takes effect? I don't want to speculate about a policy that has not been adopted yet. But here's a little copyright clarification. Copyright starts in the hands of the author. As part of an NIH grant agreement, the author grants to NIH a non-exclusive license to publish, reproduce or otherwise use any copyrighted works, including research articles, that are produced with the funding. When an author signs a copyright transfer agreement with the publisher, the publisher takes the copyright subject to NIH's license. The NIH policy debate is over how NIH should use *its* license to publish, reproduce or otherwise use the articles produced with its funding. Best, MC Michael W. Carroll Associate Professor of Law Villanova University School of Law 299 N. Spring Mill Road Villanova, PA 19085 610-519-7088 (voice) 610-519-5672 (fax) Research papers at http://ssrn.com/author=330326 See also www.creativecommons.org
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Ray English wrote: 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. Please consider the logic underlying this inference: Either the author (1) did or (2) did not have to request permission from the publisher to make his own article OA (by self-archiving it) before there was any NIH policy. (1) If the author did not have to request permission from the publisher to make his own article OA (by self-archiving it) previously, then the author does not have to request permission subsequently, and the NIH policy is neither here nor there. (2) If the author did have to request permission from the publisher to make his own article OA (by self-archiving it) previously, then the author would still have to request permission subsequently (since presumably NIH cannot grant permission on the part of the publisher), and hence again the NIH policy is neither here nor there. What is true is that the NIH had added an extra, unnecessary and counterproductive complication to the process of trying to make the author's own article OA (by self-archiving it) -- by insisting that it must be self-archived in PubMed Central. For that, one does indeed have to ask permission -- but not from the publisher: from NIH! So the new (proposed) NIH policy differs from the old one only in that NIH has over-ridden its own prior refusal to grant the author the permission to self-archive in NIH's own archive, PubMed Central, prior to 6 months after publication! A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4091.html This is a rather circular and empty gain, since there is no particular reason that an author should want to make his article Open Access by self-archiving it in PubMed Central at all -- except that that is what NIH happens to be specifically bidding him to do (for no good reason). The author could have self-archived it in his own institutional archive all along, from day 1, with or without NIH's permission, and with the blessing of 92% of journals: http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php So the new NIH policy is only closer to OA in the sense that it is less-far than it had itself arbitrarily distanced itself from OA in the first place. And it is still nowhere near OA. Nor has it given the researchers more control over anything except their ability to fulfill NIH's own arbitrary stipulations (about PubMed Central), which have nothing whatsoever to do with OA (and instead make OA more unlikely). Authors have the clear option to make their work openly accessible immediately at the time of publication. Authors had that option all along, irrespective of NIH: The NIH policy had been intended to induce them to *use* that option; instead, it added further constraints, then removed some of them, without inducing the author to provide OA at all. (By the way, OA, by definition, can only be provided immediately; delayed access is not Open Access but Back Access.) (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.) The idea had been to induce authors to provide OA (the OA that they were already able to provide if they chose, without NIH, but they were not yet choosing to). Instead, the NIH policy would induce them to provide access within 12 months, and in PubMed Central. The result is not only a policy that would not induce authors to provide OA, but it would induce publishers (and already has) to renege on giving authors the green light to provide OA by immediate self-archiving, back-sliding instead to Back Access -- in the name of NIH, in the service of OA! 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. Both versions are bad, but whether increasing the needless delay from 6-12 offsets NIH's initial needless and arbitrary refusal to allow self-archiving in PubMed Central before 6 is a minor matter: the policy would not require authors to provide OA by self-archiving immediately and it already does induce publishers to back-slide on their prior green light to immediate self-archiving. I don't think we need to wait several years to pronounce the policy as bad and ill-conceived. 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. One can always measure outcomes. In the
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
For those with neither the passion nor the patience for Key Stroke Romances, here is the short version of the posting below: It takes N keystrokes (in M minutes) to make an article Open Access (OA) by self-archiving it. The first few keystrokes are the metadata (author, title, journal, etc.). The next-to-last keystroke is the upload key to deposit the full text, and the Nth keystroke is to set the accessibility of that full text from institution-internal (the default option) to Open Access. (The metadata are in any case accessible to all, webwide). The NIH-12 policy would be to encourage NIH fundees to perform these keystrokes within 12 months of publication. The Institutional Keystroke (IK-0) policy would be to require all institutional researchers (or their assistants) to perform the first N-1 of the keystrokes immediately upon acceptance of the article, and the Nth one (Open Access) at a time of their own choosing (though with encouragement to do that immediately as well, and to do the keystrokes for preprints well before acceptance too). Les Carr suggests that the two policies are compatible, and they are. But it is an open question whether NIH-12 helps or hinders IK-0, and particularly whether it hastens or retards that Nth keystroke (Open Access). I am inclined to think it hinders and retards a little, but not much. The real barrier to 100% OA for the past 10 years has been the keystroke barrier itself, no more, no less. Authors will not perform those first N-1 keystrokes until/unless required to do so. We can have a good deal of confidence in the likelihood of their performing the Nth keystroke, once the first N-1 have been done. Swan Brown asked authors to say how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in... repositories. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly. Swan, A. Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html Swan, A. Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224. http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/ Now you can think about it, forget it, or read on: PETER SUBER: (1) It's true that the NIH has recently revised its policy. Formerly, it would have provided free online access for deposited articles six months after their publication in journals. The new policy makes the embargo period anything from zero to 12 months, at the author's choice. If there's an advantage, it's that authors could choose release earlier than six months, which formerly required the publisher's consent. If there's a disadvantage, it's that authors could choose release much later than six months. The NIH will urge authors to allow public access as soon as possible. But it's likely that some publishers will urge authors to wait as long as possible, putting authors in the difficult position of having to choose between their funder and their publisher. In my view, this is a net loss and a regrettable retreat by the NIH. I'll have a lot more to say about it in the February issue of my newsletter, which should mail next Wednesday (February 2). As has already been pointed out in an earlier posting, there is a slight misunderstanding here: It was not providing free online access prior to 6 months post-publication that required the publisher's consent in the prior version of the NIH policy and no longer requires the publisher's consent in the latest version. Rather, it was providing free online access *in PubMed Central* that was denied *NIH's* consent in the prior version, and no longer requires NIH consent in the latest version. This has nothing whatsoever to do with publisher consent, one way or the other. LES CARR: This explanation of NIH from Peter Suber seems to cast a whole new light on the affair. It could be argued that NIH-12 has the same effect as Harnad-Keystrokes with a 12-month cutoff on the dilly-dallying - especially if the 12-month figure is a RELEASE embargo rather than a deposit embargo. I would say that the Immediate-Keystrokes (IK-0) Mandate and NIH's Within-12-months (NIH-12) Encouragement may be in a similar spirit, but are unlikely to have the same effect: Indeed they are somewhat at odds. Consider: Of course it was nonsense of NIH originally to have suggested that NIH would not *allow* self-archiving (in PubMed Central) earlier than 6 months (except if there has been payment to the publisher) when 79% of journals have already given their green light to immediate self-archiving of the postprint (plus 13% for self-archiving the earlier preprint). So that absurdity was bound to be corrected. But now what we have is an NIH encouragement (not a requirement) to self-archive by 12 months (with many publishers moving
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Stevan, I think the assertion you express here isn't quite right: (2) If the author did have to request permission from the publisher to make his own article OA (by self-archiving it) previously, then the author would still have to request permission subsequently (since presumably NIH cannot grant permission on the part of the publisher), and hence again the NIH policy is neither here nor there. As I understand it, the NIH status overrides any question of publisher permission. It's a prior condition stemming from NIH having funded the research in the first place. So the policy would allow some research to be made openly accessible where that would otherwise not be possible (in the small percentage of journals that don't allow self archiving). I would also point out that the NIH does not require deposit into PubMed Central. But by allowing it, they do create some additional opportunities for OA that don't exist outside the NIH context. It remains to be seen what the overall effect of the policy will be. While it's certainly not ideal, I do think it's a significant step forward in terms of access to research. Ray English Director of LIbraries Oberlin College --On Sunday, January 30, 2005 11:46 PM + Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: Ray English wrote: 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. Please consider the logic underlying this inference: Either the author (1) did or (2) did not have to request permission from the publisher to make his own article OA (by self-archiving it) before there was any NIH policy. (1) If the author did not have to request permission from the publisher to make his own article OA (by self-archiving it) previously, then the author does not have to request permission subsequently, and the NIH policy is neither here nor there. (2) If the author did have to request permission from the publisher to make his own article OA (by self-archiving it) previously, then the author would still have to request permission subsequently (since presumably NIH cannot grant permission on the part of the publisher), and hence again the NIH policy is neither here nor there. What is true is that the NIH had added an extra, unnecessary and counterproductive complication to the process of trying to make the author's own article OA (by self-archiving it) -- by insisting that it must be self-archived in PubMed Central. For that, one does indeed have to ask permission -- but not from the publisher: from NIH! So the new (proposed) NIH policy differs from the old one only in that NIH has over-ridden its own prior refusal to grant the author the permission to self-archive in NIH's own archive, PubMed Central! A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4091.html This is a rather circular and empty gain, since there is no particular reason that an author should want to make his article Open Access by self-archiving it in PubMed Central in particular -- except that that is what NIH happens to be specifically bidding him to do (for no good reason). The author could have self-archived it in his own institutional archive all along, from day 1, with or without NIH's permission, and with the blessing of 92% of journals: http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php So the new NIH policy is only closer to OA in the sense that it is less-far than it had arbitrarily distanced itself from OA in the first place. And it is still nowhere near OA. Nor has it given the researchers more control over anything except their ability to fulfill NIH's arbitrary stipulations (about PubMed Central), which have nothing whatsoever to do with OA (and instead make OA more unlikely). Authors have the clear option to make their work openly accessible immediately at the time of publication. They had that option all along, irrespective of NIH: The NIH policy had been intended to induce them to *use* that option; instead, it added further constraints, then removed some of them, without inducing the author to provide OA at all. (By the way, OA, by definition, can only be provided immediately; delayed access is not OA but Back Access.) (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.) The idea had been to induce authors to provide OA (the OA that they were already able to provide if they chose, without NIH, but they were not yet choosing to). Instead, NIH would induce them to provide access within 12 months, and in PubMed Central. The result
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 ray.engl...@oberlin.edu wrote: As I understand it, the NIH status overrides any question of publisher permission. It's a prior condition stemming from NIH having funded the research in the first place. Can someone please explain this NIH override, what it applies to, and when it takes effect? I would also point out that the NIH does not require deposit into PubMed Central. But by allowing it, they do create some additional opportunities for OA that don't exist outside the NIH context. As I understand it, NIH does not require anything, it just encourages. And the only thing it encourages (in the current proposed version of the policy) is to deposit in PMC, within 12 months of publication. Stevan Harnad
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
From: venkatachalam venkatcha...@sancharnet.in To: BOAI Forum boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: changes in NIH and nature policies dear members greetings i hear with concern that NIH has increased the embargo period for release of NIH funded research info from the earlier 6 months to 1 year. simultaneously, the leading magazine, nature has announced that it is reviewing its policy of granting self archiving privilege to its authors. i believe that both developments, if confirmed, are a blow to further development of our open access movement. these can very well impede the rapid flow of scientific information without barriers or restrictions. i do not have the complete details and i have addressed both organisations about this. i would welcome feedback from our members on these important issues. yours v.lakshminarayanan palani india 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 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-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
Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
NIH's proposed Public Access policy of requesting that NIH-funded research should be made freely accessible online 6-12 months after publication is not Open Access (OA), nor is it a satisfactory substitute or compromise for OA, nor is it a policy that helps OA happen sooner. NIH-6/12 is Back Access (BA) (as in back-issue or back-volume), not Open Access (OA), and if the NIH-6/12 proposal were cloned and copied by other research funders and other nations in the mistaken belief that it was OA or would help hasten OA, that cloned NIH-6/12 policy would in fact lock in a 6-12 month delay/embargo period for years to come, and this would (unintentionally) set back the prospects of OA very substantially for years to come. Some signs of this untoward effect of NIH's ill-conceived BA-6/12 proposal are already visible: The Wellcome Trust has already adopted (pre-emptively) BA-6. And Nature Publishing Group, formerly green on immediate self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint, has recently made a press release -- perhaps timed (unsuccessfully) to coincide with the expected (but now delayed) announcement of NIH-6/12 -- to the effect that Nature is Back-Sliding from its postprint green policy and replacing it by BA-6 (presumably in line with NIH-6/12): Although one cannot legislate by lexicon, the meaning of the recently coined term Open Access is: Immediate, permanent, online access to the full-texts of peer-reviewed research journal articles, free for all users, webwide The term was coined to contrast Open Access with Toll Access, in which the only users who can access and use the articles online are those whose institutions (or the users themselves) can afford the publisher's access tolls (subscription, license, or pay-to-view). Note that TA is spatially restricted access -- only users at the right place can have access -- whereas OA is spatially unrestricted access for all would-be users, everywhere. What about temporally restricted access? The purpose of Open Access is to maximize the usage, impact and benefits of research articles, by making them available to *all* their would-be users worldwide, not just to those whose institutions can afford Toll Access. It is through research uptake and usage that research progresses. Indeed, that is why research is published at all: to be accessed, used, applied, built upon. The difference between current issues and Back Issues or Back Volumes is clear. It's the difference between current research and past research, between the growth region and the static core, between cutting-edge immediacy and past history. How much difference does a 6-12 month access delay make, then? Although this will no doubt vary somewhat with the discipline involved, it is *particularly* true in the fast-moving biomedical sciences (NIH's focus, after all) that research usage and impact and progress begins from the moment a refereed piece of research is made available to the world research community (even earlier, at the pre-refereeing stage, sometimes), and things can potentially move lightning fast thereafter -- *if* the results are accessible to use and build upon. Any needless access-delay from that moment onward is exactly that: needless delay, hence needless loss of research access, usage, impact progress, and benefits. And it is precisely so as to put an end to that needless delay and loss that the Open Access initiative came into being: Temporal access restrictions are every bit as inimical to the progress of research as spatial ones are. It must not be forgotten that it is the online medium (the Web) that has made it possible to put an end to all needless delay and loss in research usage and impact. Before the advent of the online medium, the costs and constraints of paper publication and distribution made Open Access an impossible proposition, regardless of how beneficial it would have been for research progress. Now it is 100% feasible and fully within reach to make all refereed research immediately accessible to all its would-be users worldwide. Hence all further delay and loss of research access and impact now amounts to needless and unjustifiable loss and delay. Can the access delay be justified by considering factors other than its effects on research? If there were any credible evidence that Toll Access publishing and cost-recovery cannot peacefully co-exist with authors immediately making supplementary copies of their peer-reviewed drafts OA by self-archiving them for all would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the official Toll Access version then there might be grounds for further reflection on this. But all the evidence is precisely in the opposite direction: There are (Toll Access) physics journals whose articles have been made accessible for free online in author-provided supplements since 1991, and for some, 100% of their contents have been freely accessible in this way for years now, yet their subscription revenues have not eroded. The
