RE: Results of the NIH Plan

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

Perhaps none of the participants in the NIH plan come out looking very
well, and I suggest they not compete for the position of next-to-worst.

An adequate discussion would be a very lengthy one, which will perhaps be
written some day.  However, I'd still like to summarize how it looks to a
relative outsider. (I know that every separate part of what I say would
need to be defended; but this has been done at sufficient length
elsewhere. I will not do so in response to this posting, which is opinion,
not history.)

The publishers, after announcing their initial total opposition,
eventually responded with relatively complicated plans with varying
embargos and other conditions. Some designed their plans to help the
authors, but some designed their plans to follow the letter of the
regulations in a way that might have been aimed at failure.

The NIH, instead of starting with a strong plan with an uniform
requirement, and sticking to it, started with a weak plan that became
successively weaker. Their defenders would say that in that case we might
have had no plan at all, but the NIH ended up without any actual
requirement, and embargos longer than most publishers' own practice, which
is rather close to that.

They compounded this by integrating it into the PMC plan to decompose
journal content into a database, from which they would reconstitute
facsimiles of the original article. (Such a plan may have merits, but the
combination confused almost everyone, including myself--I did not believe
it until a friend sent me a copy of what had been outlined at a meeting.)

The OA community, instead of supporting only a good plan, continued to
support the NIH plan as it decayed. Further, individual advocates
continued to advocate the inclusion of their pet ideas, down to the last
detail, rather than focusing om the central weaknesses: the lack of a
requirement, and the presence of an embargo.

They and the NIH further lost all believability by trying to pretend it
would not harm any journals, when it was obvious that the most they could
have accurately said is that it would not harm any journals the first year
or two.

The librarians, who generally immediately understood the weaknesses, were
carefully kept out of the crucial parts of their discussion--and what some
of them may have known, they did not share. Everyone who was not in NIH's
self-selected committee resented this, regardless of position.

The authors may not have paid close attention, but they often do not pay
attention to the details of publication, just as all the surveys
indicated.  Their publishers have said a great many different things, and
they can be excused for thinking that there is no mandated OA, for there
is in fact no mandated OA.

We are thus left with a plan that if it "succeeds," will result in the
expense and confusion of a dual publication system, will harm most
journals if not subsidized, and will provide OA only to non-current
material.

If legislators, in reviewing these results, consider that the whole system
is so dysfunctional as to be better abolished, we will have what we
deserve. Peter Banks and I are scheduled to debate exactly that question
on Nov. 5 at the Charleston Conference.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu