NIH proposal

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

It is eminently reasonable for the NIH or any other granting body to make
stipulations as to the dissemination of information based on supported
research.  Commercial organizations do this all the time, so why not the
Feds?  Companies typically restrict dissemination rather than promote it
(the opposite of the NIH proposal), but the principle is the same.  The
NIH is not requiring that Elsevier or Wiley or any other publisher make
materials available in an Open Access format; the stipulation will bind
authors, who have an increasing number of channels to do this.  In effect,
publishers, both commercial and not-for-profit, will only be able to
obtain six months' exclusivity on NIH-funded content; after that, the
rights would become nonexclusive.  Different publishers will respond to
this in different ways.

When the time comes, as it surely will, for libraries to begin canceling
subscriptions for some (not all) journals whose content is significantly
available in an OA format after six months (let's not call these
"second-tier" journals but "non-urgent" publications), some publishers
(not all) will reduce the number of new publications or cut back on the
number of current publications or get out of the business entirely.  Some
(not all) of this slack will be made up by various kinds of author-pays
mechanisms. (David Prosser has argued this point and I won't try to match
his eloquence.)  

It should be noted, however, that there will be many articles that can't
find a publisher (which is already true in the proprietary user-pays
arena), but for which there are authors with an obligation to their
funding agency to make the material available through OA.  These authors
will of necessity seek some form of self-publishing (e.g., self-archiving,
institutional archiving, posting entire papers to online mailgroups, or
blogging), which will not carry with it traditional pre-publication peer
review.  Of course, even such informally "published" papers will attract
readers (bless Google) and comments, what I have called, to much
consternation, post-publication peer review and Peter Suber terms
"retrospective" peer review, a better formulation.

Does this mean that traditional (that is, pre-publication) peer review
will disappear?  Not at all; it will simply become a smaller and smaller
part of the total, which will continue to grow.  This is not a matter of
advocacy but of inevitability.

Joe Esposito