RE: Results of the NIH Plan

["T Scott Plutchak" <tscott@uab.edu>]

For what it's worth, the chairs of the MLA and AAHSL scholarly
communications committees asked their members to gather information on
their campuses about why so few authors seem to be submitting their
manuscripts.  Over the past two weeks, I've consulted with deans (several
of our schools are highly ranked in the amount of NIH funding they
receive), research center directors, department chairs, senior
administrators, and faculty with strong NIH portfolios.  The consensus
view is that the primary obstacle is that the policy is not mandatory and
is not seen as having any particular benefit to the investigators.
Investigators already feel that they have to spend inordinate amounts of
time complying with paperwork requirements at the federal and local levels
and thus, even when they are sympathetic to the goals of the NIH policy,
they are not likely to expend the time and effort necessary. Few people
claimed that faculty awareness of or confusion about the policies were a
significant issue.  Some felt that the policy itself was too poorly
formulated to achieve the desired goals, and therefore saw little purpose
in complying.  Administrators have to work hard to insure compliance with
mandatory policies and are therefore unlikely to add to the pressure on
investigators by trying to get them to comply with a non-mandatory policy.

Anecdotal, to be sure; but I talked to enough people that I think it's a
pretty fair representation of the state of things at UAB (the university
is currently ranked 22 among all institutions receiving NIH funding; the
school of medicine is ranked 18 among medical schools).

T. Scott Plutchak
 
Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
tscott@uab.edu
 

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of "FrederickFriend"
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 5:17 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Results of the NIH Plan

I suspect the clue to the author behaviour Peter describes lies in his
statement that "ADA is fairly unusual in allowing authors to post their
accepted manuscript immediately upon acceptance". Even if ADA makes that
information cystal-clear to its authors and does not hide it away in the
small type of a legal document, authors will not be expecting ADA to have
such an enlightened policy while many other US learned societies impose
restrictions. They will assume that ADA's policy is like others with which
they are familiar.

Fred Friend

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>
To: <ssp@lists.sspnet.org>; <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 2:30 AM
Subject: Results of the NIH Plan

>I thought it might be interesting to share the American Diabetes  
>Association's experience with the PMC system for author manuscriupts,  
>since ADA is fairly unusual in allowing authors to post their accepted

>manuscript immediately upon acceptance. Thus, the posting of Diabetes and
>Diabetes Care papers on PMC shows how successful the NIH system is absent
>any publisher-mandated delay. The success of the system with articles in
>our journals goes to the question of whether author failure to comply
>with the system can be attributed to publishers, or rather to the
>resistance of researchers and universities to comply with the system.
>
>Since the PMC system's debut, Diabetes has accepted 134 original 
>articles, and Diabetes Care has accepted 122.
>
>In 2004, 39% of Diabetes manuscripts were NIH funded, as were 15% of 
>Diabetes Care manuscripts. Using those percentages, we would expect 
>that
>53 Diabetes manuscripts and 18 Diabetes Care manuscripts were NIH 
>
>To date, one author manuscript from either journal has been posted on
>PMC. Chu K, Tsai MJ. Related Articles, Links Neuronatin, a downstream
>target of BETA2/NeuroD1 in the pancreas, is involved in glucose-mediated
>insulin secretion. Diabetes. 2005 Apr;54(4):1064-73.  PMID: 15793245
>[PubMed -
>
> indexed for MEDLINE]
>
> [Incidentally, it is the wrong version of the manuscript.]
>
> My conclusion is that lack of compliance with the NIH plan is primarily
> the responsibility of NIH. I suspect that researchers are not at all
> convinced of the value of the system [researchers I know are openly
> hostile to it, and see it as yet another bureaucratic burden or little
> benefit to them]. It may also be that the manuscript submission system
> or the PMC site itself is not perceived as user-friendly.
>
> Peter Banks
> Publisher
> American Diabetes Association
> Email: pbanks@diabetes.org