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No. 121 | |
Sept/Oct 2004 |
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Scholarly Publishing Update Government Activities In July, the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee approved a provision in the NIH FY 2005 appropriations bill which recommends that all research articles resulting from NIH-funded research be made available for free via PubMed Central within six months of publication, or immediately if the publication fees were paid with NIH funds. The appropriations bill has been approved by the House, and despite heavy lobbying by some groups, including the Association of American Publishers and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, it appears that the bill has a good chance of being approved by the Senate. NIH has been instructed to report to the Appropriations Committee by December 1 about how it will implement the policy. The Director of NIH met with different stakeholders to get their input before developing the plan, and issued a call (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html) for public comments. NIH has provided a web form making it easy for people to indicate support for the proposal (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/public_access/add.htm), and an email address to which comments can be addressed (PublicAccess@nih.gov) before the November 16th comment deadline. A group of 25 Nobel Prize winners recently sent a letter to Congress (https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/991.html) supporting the proposal, and the National Academy of Sciences issued a statement in favor of the proposal (http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/s09162004?OpenDocument). Approximately 11-12% of the articles indexed in MEDLINE would be covered by the NIH proposal. In December of 2003, the UK House of Commons began a study of scientific publishing to address pricing and availability issues. The report, Scientific Publications: Free for All? (www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm), was published in July of 2004, and recommends storing all articles published by UK institutions of higher education in a network of online repositories that can be accessed free of charge. The report also addresses concerns about open access publishing and concludes that OA publishing would greatly increase access to scientific information and “ensure a fairer global distribution of the costs of publishing research findings.” Specific calls for action include the establishment of a fund by the UK’s Research Councils to support publication in open access journals, and the provision of government funding to encourage institutions and publishers to experiment with open access publishing models. The UK’s Office of Science and Technology will respond to the report and may issue new regulations or requirements concerning scientific publishing. The European Commission launched an investigation of scientific publishing in June of 2004, with results to be available in 2005. The goal is to study the evolution of the scholarly publishing industry in Europe and to determine the “conditions required for optimum operation …and assess the extent to which the Commission can help to meet these conditions.” Cost of STM Publishing In April, Credit Suisse published a financial analysis of the scientific, medical and technical (STM) publishing. A summary is available at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-03-04.htm#creditsuisse. In May, the Wellcome Trust published a report entitled Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing (www.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtd003184.pdf) which concluded that open access publishing could reduce the cost of scientific publishing by as much as 30%. Also in May, the American Chemical Society posted compensation data for its top executives on its website (www.chemistry.org). The Chronicle of Higher Education issue for August 18 contained an article about the furor over the salary the American Chemical Society’s executive director was paid for 2002 ($767,834) and $1.4 million in total compensation in 2000. The society has 159,999 members, $420 million in annual revenues, and $1 billion in assets. According to the Chronicle article, “…the current executive director…is not the society’s highest-paid employee. The top-paid employees…are on the publications side.” ACS journals are not published under an open access publishing model and charge subscriptions for access. Impact Factors Reported On June 24th, ISI issued its latest impact factors report (for 2001-2002 journals) and a study which showed that the nearly 200 BMC open access journals currently being tracked compared favorably with other journals (www.isinet.com/oaj). Several BMC journals rank near the top in their disciplines, including Arthritis Research & Therapy, Breast Cancer Research, and Critical Care. Since these journals are only a few years old, the results indicate that open access publishing increases impact and facilitates high visibility for these journals. Expansion of PubMed Central In June, the UK’s Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee entered an agreement with the US National Library of Medicine to digitize the backfiles of several important journals, including the Annals of Surgery, Biochemical Journal, Journal of Physiology, and Medical History. The first titles will be online through PubMed Central early in 2005. NLM has already completed digitizing the backfiles of many other journals through its backfile digitization program (http://pubmedcentral.com/about/scanning.html) including the Biochemical Journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell and Cell Regulation. Publisher Developments In May, PNAS introduced an open access publishing option. Authors may choose to pay a $1,000 fee to make their articles available for free immediately via PNAS Online and PubMed Central. In June, Oxford Journals announced that Nucleic Acids Research will be published under a full open access model (with publication fees instead of journal subscriptions) beginning in January, 2005. Also in June, Elsevier announced (www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040607-2.shtml) that authors of papers published in Elsevier journals can post their articles on their personal or institutional websites, but posting to any other repository will require Elsevier’s permission. In July, Springer announced that authors could choose between traditional publication in a Springer journal and an open access model with a publication fee of $3,000 per article. However, Springer still requires that all authors give up copyright to Springer and it prohibits posting the articles on other servers. Also in July, BMJ announced (www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/pr-releases?pr=20040727) a subscription model that allows access to original research articles for free, with the full text of other articles/letters/editorials, etc. free for the first week, controlled access for 51 weeks, and then after a year, all content will be free again. In April, Dr. Robert Mrak and Dr. Sue Griffin, both from UAMS, established a new BioMed Central journal entitled the Journal of Neuroinflammation. In May, BioMed Central announced that the National Library of Finland had purchased an institutional membership in BMC which includes all 25,000 publicly funded researchers and teachers in Finland. In October, all universities, hospitals and polytechnics research institutes in Norway became BMC members. All UK public colleges and universities and the NHS were already BMC members, bringing the total number of BMC members to over 450. UAMS has an institutional membership in BMC. As of October 1, BioMed Central is publishing 120 open access journals. All are included in PubMed and PubMed Central, and over 50 are indexed in MEDLINE. Twenty-two are tracked by ISI for impact factors. (www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/indexing) In October, Public Library of Science announced the launch of its second open access journal, which is PLoS Medicine (http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-toc&issn=1549-1676&volume=1&issue=1).
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