NIH issues

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Never thought I would be writing this, but the bill to overturn 
the NIH's open access policy is wrongheaded, in my opinion.  Now 
that I have zero friends among traditional publishers (not that I 
ever had many), let me explain.

The current NIH policy, in my view, is terrible, as it takes 
property it didn't pay for, namely, the editorial review 
performed by publishers; and it is reviewed material that is 
intended to go into the publicly available repositories.  The OA 
activists strongly disagree with my perspective and will no doubt 
pounce on this post.

My reading of the "anti-NIH" bill, however, is that it goes too 
far.  By my reading it is saying that the government cannot 
require an author to assign a copyright.  This I don't 
understand.  Publishers do this all the time; it would be a rare 
publisher that has never used, say, a work-for-hire agreement. 
Is it not reasonable for an organization to say, "We are paying 
you to do something and we own what we pay for"?  I personally 
signed two such agreements this week, agreeing to assign to 
clients any intellectual property I created on their dime.

Where I would have liked the NIH brouhaha to end up is with the 
NIH creating a repository (or causing to have one created by a 
more skillful IT organization)for reports submitted by resarchers 
as a condition of funding. There would be a template for such 
reports (what to include, length, access to underlying data, 
etc.), and the reports would be part of the public record. Note 
that these reports would not go through a formal peer review 
process unless the individual researcher sought such review.

All reports in the repository would be open for all to use, for 
any purpose whatsoever, including commercial exploitation. 
Three conditions:  cite the author, cite the NIH, and don't 
change the text without the author's approval.  Yes, indeedy, 
this would have major structural implications for certain 
segments of STM publications.

Looks like this is not going to happen.  Blame it on the OA 
activists, who asked for too much and now may get nothing.

Joe Esposito