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Published online 7 November 2007 | Nature 450, 148 (2007) | doi:10.1038/450148a
News in Brief
Congress to vote on open access and NIH funds
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Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
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"irresponsible and excessive" seems an apt description of the military budget...
I am wondering if Congress' intent for 'free availability' will at some point impact research data collected and analyzed with NIH funds. This could be quite tricky, particularly with ePHI data and could substantially change information management practice.
Leaving aside the party politics that seem to be tromping on this bill (though, indeed, where does the current US regime get the right to call _anything_ "irresponsible and excessive"!?), one would think there is a clear moral requirement to make the results of research funded by the public freely available to the public. Effectively, if taxpayers have "bought" the research, they ought to have access to their "goods". This would seem a reasonable approach for all publicly funded research, in the humanities as well as the sciences. I suppose we could then go on to argue about _whose_ taxpayers have funded _which_ bit of research, but that seems needlessly petty. If the research is for, by, and of the people, then let them at it! It's not like there's any great cost associated with publishing PDFs online these days.
"[I]nvestigators...may soon be compelled to publish only in journals that make their research papers freely available..." This is false. The language says nothing about where investigators must publish. Rather, it requires submission of an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscript to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.
Relatively few journals, as a matter of policy, make their papers freely available. The bill stipulates investigators submit their article, even if its published in a journal that does not normally make all its papers freely available. A big change for most publishers, to be sure, but they only hurt themselves by trying to make the case that depositing articles in an open repository threatens the peer review process (see http://www.prismcoalition.org/). Publishers are not the "peer" in peer review.
Note that Nature and the Nature journals' policies already go further than the proposed bill, in that we encourage authors to archive their final accepted version of the paper into their funders' and institutions' archives (and on their own websites if desired) six months after journal publication. Our polices are at: http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/license.html