Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 7 April 2009 |
Nature
| doi:10.1038/458690a
Corrected online: 15 April 2009
News
Open-access policy flourishes at NIH
Researchers, institutions and publishers have complied with the mandate, but it still has its opponents.
One year on, advocates of free public access to scientific literature are calling a law that requires researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their manuscripts publicly available at the PubMed Central repository a success. At the same time, the measure continues to be challenged by a senior congressman and some publishers.
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How about "double open" - open access and open review - for every scientific publication funded by public money? Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com)
The open access policy is a real boon for scientists in the developing world where journal subscriptions are too expensive for most institutions. But it has its downside as developing-world scientists are now finding that they do not have the money to pay the author fees. The article is only focused on US scientists and seems to ignore the fact the there is a global community of scientists who all need to be encouraged both to publish and to read the literature.
The HINARI initiative provides immediate free access to journals for many developing countries. It is widely supported amongst publishers, who are happy to accommodate it within subscription models that don't require author fees: http://www.who.int/hinari/en/
The NIH should at least provide publishers with detailed usage statistics on how many times their articles are being downloaded from PubMed Central. Librarians base subscription cancellations (at least partially) on usage, and without this data, valid uses of documents that have gone through a publisher-mediated peer-review process will not be counted.
Whether the NIH policy "flourishes" or not depends on how many people access the available information, not on how many articles are uploaded, which simply reflects compliance. The point of the policy is to enhance the flow of information generated through public funds, which I think is a great idea, so to measure its success several questions need to be considered: has the NIH policy really made the information more accessible? and, if so, to whom and at what cost? The usage statistics are the critical ones.
I love Nature for standing opposed to other publishers here. The issue is a market forces issue. For too long, publishers have had the market on scientific publishing cornered. They pay through the nose for proprietary software that gets outmoded or outdated sooner than it comes online. Smart publishers adapt to new situations (wink @ Nature). Other publishers, fully aware they have gorged themselves on outrageous, oligopolistic, price increases for the past decade, are not ready to be forced to vomit (wink @ Elsevier). Negative pressure on publisher profit margins is positive news for researchers, who pay at least a fraction of the subscription costs of their universities.
Both the raising of author fees at PLoS and the return to a subscription model at JoVE illustrate the crucial issue regarding open access: there is no free lunch. Much as the JoVE editor/founder thinks that 'open access is a great idea' but the journal 'simply cannot survive with the open-access model', many people might think that a coffee shop providing free lattes would be a great idea, until they realized such a shop couldn't remain in business without a source of revenue. And just as a law requiring coffee shops not to charge money for coffee would result in coffee shops going out of business, so too will open access laws cause publishers to go out of business. Journal publishers provide a service, and have a moral right to charge money in exchange for that service, whether it be in the form of author fees or subscription fees. If a person (or institution) doesn't wish to pay those fees, he (or it) has a right to abstain from the service. But to claim that a publisher must offer a service for free, without compensation, is to claim that the publisher is a slave. To pass laws to that effect is to legalize slavery.