SPARC OA Newsletter July Issue

["Rich Dodenhoff" <rdodenhoff@aspet.org>]

The "clarification" of ASPET's publication policies presented in the
July SPARC Open Access Newsletter requires some clarification.

For its three primary-research journals, ASPET makes all accepted
manuscripts freely available online immediately, and they remain freely
available after the fully formatted and copyedited version is published.
ASPET allows authors to deposit their accepted manuscripts with PubMed
Central, but the Society asks that they be released at the PubMed Central
site 12 months after publication in ASPET's journals.

The SPARC OA Newsletter originally did not report that ASPET makes
accepted manuscripts freely available immediately.  After asking for a
correction, I provided the two reasons that ASPET is asking authors to not
release their manuscripts at PMC for 12 months.

First, ASPET derives advertising income from its online journals.  The
amount is not large, but it is more than we can afford to loose.  Three
of ASPET's five journals operate in the red.  Hits to our journal sites,
therefore, are crucial to maintaining--and hopefully increasing--this
income.  Peter Suber wrote the following:

"(1) On traffic:  PMC shares its usage data with journals that maintain
full runs in PMC, just as Highwire Press does for example.  It does not
yet share usage data with journals that have only miscellaneous articles
in PMC as a result of the NIH public-access policy, but it will consider
doing so."

Hits to the PMC site don't mean a fig to advertisers considering ASPET's
sites.  An advertiser is not encouraged to place an ad on our site by
hits going to another site.  We are making all research articles freely
available; we simply ask that readers view them at our site to help
generate some advertising income.

Second, I explained that I had seen how PMC will present articles
deposited with it as a result of the NIH's enhanced public access policy.
The articles included an identifier that was PMC-specific.  When asked why
this was included, David Lipman at the National Library of Medicine
explained that a panel of librarians working with NLM/PMC felt strongly
that these articles should be identifiable independent of their
originating journals.  This information was omitted from the SPARC
newsletter.  Citations using this identifier in place of a standard
journal-related citation will not count toward the journal's impact
factor.  Perhaps there are few who would cite articles without standard
journal attribution.  So why create a separate PMC-specific identifier? We
would like ASPET articles to be attributed to our journals, especially in
the first 12 months after publication when they are most likely to be
read.

Thank you for the opportunity to better explain ASPET's policy on free
access to articles in the Society's journals.

Richard Dodenhoff
Journals Director
American Society for Pharmacology and
  Experimental Therapeutics
9650 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20814-3995
301.634.7997 (p) / 301.634.7061 (f)