NIH plan in daily Chronicle of Higher Education

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NIH's Final Plan for Free Access to Journal Articles Draws Fire From 2
Directions

By LILA GUTERMAN

The National Institutes of Health announced on Thursday its policy for
providing free access to the large swaths of the scientific literature
that draw on research it has financed. As had been widely expected, the
policy asks scientists to post their papers online within a year of
publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Beginning on May 2, all scientists whose research is supported by the NIH
will be asked (but not required) to e-mail their final manuscripts to the
agency once the papers have been accepted by a journal. Each researcher
will specify when, within a year of the publication date, the NIH may post
the manuscript on its PubMed Central Web site. The NIH estimates that the
database of articles will cost $2-million to $4-million a year to operate.

Elias A. Zerhouni, the NIH's director, called the policy a compromise
between advocates for immediate public access and organizations,
particularly publishers and scholarly societies, that have spoken out
against the NIH's involvement in the issue. "This is a policy that offers
flexibility while encouraging maximum participation," Dr. Zerhouni said
during a news conference.

A draft policy that the NIH released last fall asked scientists to post
their papers six months after publication. But the final policy strongly
encourages NIH-sponsored researchers to allow posting on PubMed Central
"as soon as possible (and within 12 months of the publisher's official
date of final publication)."

The final policy may end up pleasing neither side of the debate.

"I regret that the National Institutes of Health has scaled back its
open-access policy," Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at
Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that advocates the free flow of
information, said in a written statement. The policy, he said, "could
significantly delay public access to publicly funded medical research."

"It could even mean that the public will never have access to some of it
at all," he said.

A group of nonprofit publishers took issue with the NIH's rule for the
opposite reason. They called it unnecessary and wasteful, given that many
nonprofit publishers already maintain databases and make their contents
free within 12 months.

Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society,
said that the NIH's plan could even steer researchers toward inadvertently
violating copyright agreements. The NIH, he said, could be "party to a
violation of the copyright by publishing and ... disseminating an article
that's under copyright control of the journal." He said his organization
had not ruled out taking legal action to stop the new policy from taking
effect.

copyright 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education

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