Publishers Protest at NIH

While supporters of open access hailed a proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make all taxpayer-funded NIH research freely available within six months (see News, LJ 8/04, p. 17), representatives of more than 50 publishers visited the NIH offices in early August to voice strong opposition. "This measure caught publishers completely off-guard," said Barbara Meredith, VP of professional and scholarly publishing at the Association of American Publishers (AAP). "This essentially mandates open access without any evidentiary hearings or studies."

Rick Johnson, director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), in a letter to NIH director Elias Zerhouni, suggested that NIH had made the right choice and that publishers appeared to "misunderstand the plan, which proposes open archiving, not open-access publication." Open archiving, Johnson said, "is not a threat to journals," as articles in PubMed Central are not the final, authoritative version of the article preferred by authors for citation purposes and that the proportion of open access articles in a typical journal likely would be insufficient for libraries or individuals to cancel their subscriptions.