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Published online 18 March 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/458272b
NIH research to become permanently open access
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Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
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It is truly disheartening to know that there is an effort in Congress to OPPOSE public access to new research funded by a public agency (the U.S. National Institutes of Health) at a critical time in US history when intellectual creativity and sharing will be so vital to the recovery of the U.S. economy. The new Obama administration has opened up the US for stem cell research, and now many key research reports like this one: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=18704173 are immediately available online, to push the field forward. Why anyone would want to block progress is beyond my imagination.
The concept of open access is fine. The reality is very different. Because journals must remain profitable, they cannot afford to give away their content. We need journals to serve as filters for quality research, an incredibly important job that they do well. Immediate open access costs ~$5000 per paper, which would be a ridiculous waste of grant money. The vast majority of NIH funded research is highly technical and of no practical interest to ordinary citizens. Have you ever had a reprint request from a non-scientist? We have enough paperwork, red tape, and pointless regulations that require our wasitng our precious grant money. We do not need open access to further deplete our resources!
Mr. DeCoursey talks about 'depleting our resources' in terms of grant money. Far more Taxpayer Dollars are spent buying overpriced journals - so in terms of pure dollars, the government will make a profit from Open Access. Indeed, if it cost more to pay for articles upfront when submitting them than it does to buy the journals, journal publishers would support Open Access because it would increase their profits. Also, publishing companies must not necessarily remain profitable. Journal Publishing companies can and should go out of business if there is no need for their services. I disagree with the very premise that we have any obligation to keep these companies profitable. Peer review is not done by journals. Scientists literally give away their research to journals for free (other publications usually pay their authors) and then scientists do the peer-reviewing for free. The only indirect consequence of concern of switching a more efficient and less costly way of peer-reviewing and distributing research is the status of professional societies that depend on cross-subsidies from their journals.