Re: The Economist on OA

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

> Aug 5th 2004 From The Economist 
> http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3061258

> If the Senate approves the recommendation, it will become law and the NIH
> will be required to deposit research funded by the agency into an online
> government archive called PubMed Central within six months of publication
> in any journal. 

No, it is the NIH grant recipients, the articles' authors, who will be
required to deposit (self-archive) their articles. The NIH funds, it
doesn't publish or deposit...

> Another possibility is to generalise the House of Representatives'
> proposal for American medical research and allow the traditional journals
> a limited period of monopoly--say six months--after which they have to
> make all taxpayer-funded content available free online.

No, neither the US Government nor the NIH can require publishers to do
anything. Again, it is the grant-recipient on whom the conditions can be
imposed, as a requirement for receiving the funding. And what is being
recommended is to mandate that all peer-reviewed journal articles arising
from NIH-funded research must be made Open Access by their authors by
self-archiving within 6 months of publication.

Since 84% of journals have already given their green light to author
self-archiving, this mandate will merely exert some additional pressure on
the remaining 16% gray journals to hurry up and go green or risk losing
their NIH authors:  http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.

But the real pressure of the mandate, however, is on the (funded) authors:
They must not only publish their NIH-funded research (as previously:
"Publish or Perish") but they must also self-archive it, to make it OA.

Going on to sepcify that they should self-archive it centrally in PubMed
Central, however, is unnecessary over-management and counter-productive.
The mandate need merely be that all articles must be made OA by
self-archiving. The UK recommendations were wiser in this respect. See:

    "Re: Mandating OA around the corner?"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3873.html
    "RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ALIGNING THE UK AND US RECOMMENDATIONS"

> At the moment, the entire open access literature is tiny--less than 1% of
> what is published according to the Public Library of Science. But if
> governments were to insist that the results of research they fund must be
> published in an open-access way, that would change completely. The days of
> huge profits would then be numbered. Prestige has its uses--and the
> open-access journals will, no doubt, establish a pecking-order among
> themselves fairly quickly. But for prestige at any price, time is probably
> up.

First, the proportion of the existing 24,000 peer-reviewed journals that
is gold (Open Access Journals) is probably closer to 5% than 1% overall
today, but this is still far, far too small to even contemplate mandating
that all funded authors must publish in that 5%! http://www.doaj.org/
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html

But second, this article is again misconstruing the US recommendations,
which were to self-archive all journal articles, not to publish them in OA
journals! "Publish in an open-access way" is just a conflation of the two!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.1
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2

Stevan Harnad