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 | Battle to Resume as NIH Seeks to Require Deposit in PubMed Central
A familiar conflict is heating up once again, as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) again seeks to establish a policy that would require investigators funded wholly or in part by the agency to deposit their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's online archive. The House Committee on Appropriations should consider the policy in its deliberations, beginning July 11, regarding the fiscal year (FY) 2008 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill. Despite support from the NIH director and many in Congress, the policy change is opposed by STM publishers, who are lobbying to have the language stricken from the bill or changed.
The change recalls the fierce debate of 2004-2005. In February 2005, the NIH was set to mandate deposit in PubMed Central, but the policy was modified at the eleventh hour from a "requirement" to deposit the articles within six months to a request that NIH-funded researchers voluntarily deposit their articles within a year. Not surprisingly, compliance since the weakened policy was implemented has been remarkably low, with as little as five percent of NIH-funded researchers depositing their papers. That lagging compliance rate did not escape the scrutiny of Congress, note advocates of the policy. The Senate's 2008 appropriations bill, introduced by Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) requires NIH-funded researchers to deposit in PubMed Central an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication in a journal. Articles would then become publicly available "no later than 12 months after publication."
The policy change proposed is hardly a slam dunk, as many society publishers, successful in nixing the 2005 NIH policy proposal, say it would threaten their business and the integrity of scientific publishing. Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), said that, after three years of pushing, "the momentum is real and Congress understands the public's interest."
Signs of that momentum have emerged from a number of funding agencies and institutions worldwide, such as the Wellcome Trust in the UK, which now requires the research it funds to made freely publicly available. Last month, the Maryland-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced that it will require its scientists to publish their original research articles in scientific journals that allow articles to be "made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication." Thomas R. Cech, HHMI's president, said the policy would apply to all articles submitted after January 1, 2008 for which an HHMI scientist is a major author.
Not all publishers oppose the mandatory deposit of articles, Cech said. HHMI said it has an agreement with Elsevier that brings Cell Press and Elsevier journals into compliance with the new policy as of September 1 and that John Wiley & Sons, beginning with manuscripts submitted October 1, will even arrange for the upload of author manuscripts of original research articles, along with supplemental data, on which any HHMI scientist is an author to PubMed Central.
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Big Step: APS Introduces Open Access Option
In another sign that open access is making strides, the American Physiological Society (APS) this week unveiled a new program, Author Choice, that will allow APS authors to pay an open access (OA) fee to make their articles immediately available. The program officially launched July 1. Under the plan, authors who choose immediate access can pay the $2000 Author Choice fee, plus the customary author fees. The open access option is available to all of the APS's ten monthly research publications, as well as past articles.
Officials said the plan results from experimentation with the APS journal Physiological Genomics. During a three-year period, APS offered authors the choice of whether to pay an OA fee plus standard author charges. At the end of the test period, 18 percent of authors opted for open access. APS executive director Martin Frank said the option was key. "There will be many who do not want to pay the cost of the open access fee from their grant funding, and there will be many who do want to. As publishers, our duty is to offer them the choice and then implement it," Frank said. "We are very interested in how this change will affect an industry that is so deeply in transition." The option also gives APS journals an option for authors whose funding agency, such as the Wellcome Trust, requires open access. "Given today's market forces," Frank said, "it makes sense to let the authors decide what timing best suits their needs."
The option is also a necessary move for APS, which relies heavily on income from its journals. In a report published in its newsletter, The Physiologist, APS officials noted that subscription revenue accounted for 58 percent of all revenue and "publication revenue," accounted for 83 percent, revenue streams that have been under increasing pressure recently. "This revenue was seen to be at risk because of the activities of advocates of the OA movement," the report states. Offering an OA option will "diversify" APS's publishing revenue streams.
While Frank has been an outspoken critic of OA advocates, and in particular of the NIH's proposed policy that would mandate deposit of scientific papers in a single government-run depository, he is the initiator of the DC Principles for free access. He characterized Author Choice as one of several recent innovations undertaken by the APS. "Ten years ago we made online access to our journals immediately available for a nominal fee," he noted. "Seven years ago we made all articles free online after 12 months. Two years ago we made articles available to all patients in need, at no charge. Now we are letting the researchers and their organizations dictate when the results of their research are made available to the public free of charge."
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| That Time of Year: Elsevier Announces its Annual Price Increase
Elsevier this week sent its annual "Dear librarian" letter announcing its forthcoming annual price increase. "Elsevier is targeting a price increase of just below six percent on average across our journals in 2008," noted Frank Vrancken Peeters, global sales director. The complete 2008 title-by-title price lists will be posted on Elsevier.com. Peeters said that the number of research articles published each year grows by around 3-4 percent annually and that last year was no exception: "In fact, growth of Elsevier-published articles increased above this long-term rate. Online usage of Elsevier-published articles on ScienceDirect continues to increase by more than 20 percent: ScienceDirect recently passed the milestone of one billion articles downloaded." The projected increase is up slightly from last year's 5.5 percent increase, which, Peeters noted, was in the bottom quartile of publishers. The six percent figure is an average across all Elsevier titles, officials noted, given that prices at each institution will vary depending upon its mix of titles and the terms of their ScienceDirect contracts.
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| Peter Lyman, Former UC Berkeley Librarian, Dies at 66
Sad news from California: Peter Lyman, former university librarian and professor emeritus at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, died at home July 2 after a long battle with brain cancer. He was 66. Lyman came to national prominence in 2000 when, with Hal Varian, he co-authored a snapshot of our information overload, the widely cited study "How Much Information?" (updated in 2003). Lyman and Varian estimated that worldwide information production in the digital age had increased an average of 30 percent each year from 1999 to 2002, enough to fill half a million libraries the size of the Library of Congress.
Lyman was born in San Francisco, and earned a master's degree in political science at Berkeley in 1963 and a doctorate in political science at Stanford in 1972. He also was one of the founders of James Madison College, a residential college at Michigan State University. He was appointed university librarian at the University of Southern California in 1991. He joined Berkeley in 1994, serving as university librarian from 1994 to 1998 and as a professor in the School of Information. He became emeritus professor in 2006.
University officials said a campus memorial service will take place this fall. An online memorial, meanwhile, has already begun to fill up with touching remembrances. "Peter fought infinite battles against bureaucratic abominations. He was always calm and serene, yet strong and determined. Above all, he was a great human being," wrote Matteo Bittanti, a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Information. Lyman's effectiveness as a teacher and mentor is also well represented. "I couldn't have asked for more out of an advisor," commented Danah Boyd, a doctoral student and advisee of Lyman's. "He always knew who I should talk to or what I should read or how to make me think about a problem from a new direction. And no matter how crotchety I got in the field, he always gave me hope that change could happen."
"Peter Lyman was one of the most inspiring library leaders I ever encountered." wrote James H. Spohrer, librarian for the Germanic Collections at UC Berkeley. "He was a great champion of collections and of the underlying values of librarianship: intellectual freedom, institutional transparency, democratic access to information. He stood up to the forces of indifference and complacency, arguing that a great university deserves a great library, and he endured a great sacrifice to insure that the UC Berkeley Library would move forward and thrive. He was a man of integrity and honor to whom the campus owes a debt of gratitude."
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| Gates Awards WebJunction $12.6 Million for Upgrades
WebJunction, the online community for library staff that has gained significant support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since it launched in 2003, has been awarded another Gates grant to ensure its future viability. The grant, for $12.6 million over four years, will be used to replace software, enhance site functionality, and provide for long-term sustainability of services to benefit the library community.
Many of the planned site enhancements are a response to user feedback and studies of the WebJunction.org and many are the result of the growth and popularity of the site, where library staff visit to share ideas, solve problems, and do online coursework. OCLC, which hosts the site, will implement a new learning management system, content management system and portal software—improving functionality and flexibility for WebJunction members and community partners. The grant also will provide support needed to help WebJunction become self-sustaining within OCLC by improving its current revenue-generating services and creating new services that will assist libraries of all types.
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