Nonprofit Publishers Offer Public Access Plan

-- Library Journal, 11/23/2005

Six months after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented its weakened public access policy for the research it funds, the signatories of the DC Principles, a group of 57 medical and scientific nonprofit publishers, have offered a counter-proposal. The plan would have the NIH offer online access to articles by linking directly to journal web sites indexed by the NIH's Medline abstracting service. Currently, the NIH plan enacted in May merely "requests" that NIH-funded authors deposit their final manuscript (as opposed to the final, edited article) in PubMed Central, the NIH's repository, within a year. That plan has satisfied virtually no one and has been heavily criticized by both opponents and proponents of the initially proposed NIH policy proposal, which would have required deposit of the final manuscript within six months of publication.

The publishers, who support increased free access to research, if not full open access, said new proposal would better serve the public in gaining access to medical literature while also ensuring the important role of scientific journals. Although submissions to PubMed Central have reportedly picked up in recent months, they have lagged far beyond what supporters of the NIH policy had hoped for. "This is the same proposal they made a year-and-half ago," observed SPARC's Heather Joseph. "It"s a good plan, but it doesn"t go the extra step we need it to go." That step, Joseph explained, is "access now and in perpetuity" for all publicly funded research.