The US National Institute of Health held a last-minute meeting last month after publishers called for further public consultation over concerns about the US implementation of open access (OA) for scientific publications.
The OA policy will require authors to post publications resulting from NIH-funded research on PubMed Central after a 12-month period.
At the meeting, publishers aired their copyright worries, pointing out that a 12-month embargo did not protect the revenues of many publishers and accusing the NIH of dismissing their concerns. They also said that meeting OA costs would divert money from research.
Gene Sprouse of the American Physical Society said: “The NIH mandate jeopardises society publishers. The NIH policies appear to target the practices of a few commercial publishers without adequate consideration of the consequences for not-for-profit publishers and other low-cost publishers.”
NIH deputy director Norka Ruiz Bravo said that concerns about adequate protection of publishers’ rights were coming through “loud and clear”.
But many US librarians welcomed the mandate. The US Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries said it was “optimistic that this policy will speed the pace of discovery by expanding access to research findings”.
OA publishers also welcomed the NIH policy. PLoS publisher Peter Jerram said: “Over the past several years PLoS and others have conclusively demonstrated the high impact of OA scientific publishing.”
He added that OA would allow more to be done with data, with new knowledge created by the linking of research papers that had not before been seen as relevant to each other.
“For this to happen,” said Jerram, “papers must be held in an OA repository and not remain hidden behind publishers’ authentication systems.”
Peter Suber, senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), said: “The new NIH public access policy serves the public interest and is long overdue. I oppose attempts by the publishing lobby to delay its implementation.”
Suber called for the 12-month NIH embargo between publication in a peer-reviewed journal and public access through PubMed Central to be reduced to six months.
