Open-access policy flourishes at NIH

Open-​​access pol­icy flour­ishes at NIH : Nature News:

One year on, advo­cates of free pub­lic access to sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture are call­ing a law that requires researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their man­u­scripts pub­licly avail­able at the PubMed Central repos­i­tory a suc­cess. At the same time, the mea­sure con­tin­ues to be chal­lenged by a senior con­gress­man and some publishers.

I always like to keep tabs on the open-​​access pub­lish­ing world. Predictably, some pub­lish­ers are com­plain­ing that this model under­mines their (quite lucra­tive, it seems from many analy­ses) profit model, but the down­turn in the econ­omy makes it dif­fi­cult to attribute jour­nal can­cel­la­tions to the NIH open-​​access man­date. Nevertheless, it seems that sub­scrip­tions are down across all dis­ci­plines, not just med­i­cine, sup­port­ing the idea that open access via the NIH is not caus­ing addi­tional prob­lems for publishers.

But Martin Frank, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, says that “in an envi­ron­ment where access is read­ily avail­able whether after 12 months or 6 months or imme­di­ately, the sub­scrip­tion model starts wob­bling”. Frank pre­dicts that, as sub­scrip­tion rev­enues tank, pub­lish­ers will be forced to levy stiff fees on authors for publishing.