The NIH open access plan has just received what Peter Suber calls 'a very important' new endorsement from the National Academy of Sciences. Peter goes on to blog this paragraph from the NAS statement:
"We wish to emphasize the importance of having publishers provide to PMC the final, published copy of each paper, rather than leaving the author's originally accepted manuscript in PMC....Providing the redacted paper will be effortless for journals that already release papers to PMC within six months of publication, and we hope that publishers who make papers free after a longer period -- or not at all -- will reconsider their policies. [...] " http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_09_12_fosblogarchive.html#a109538076633197157 Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this how the original e-biomed proposal evolved to become PubMed Central? There has been an impressive array of endorsements for the NIH plan, but in some endorsements there seems to be an implicit call to step back. I wouldn't deny the progress made by PMC, but isn't the point of the NIH plan to take this further forward, in particular by mandating author self-archiving rather than relying on volunteer publisher archiving, because in using taxpayers' money the funder can mandate funded researchers but not publishers. http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/comment.htm Since I am not a US taxpayer I have no say in this case, but there are wider issues, and others will take a lead from this. For one thing, it would be very helpful if institutions in the UK of the stature of the NAS were to (unconditionally) endorse the UK HoC recommendations, but so far there appears to be less willingness to support this publicly here than there is to support the NIH plan in the USA. Where are the endorsements for the UK recommendations? Steve Hitchcock IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865