Hardin Scholarly Communication News

Initial reaction to the NIH’s final policy from both sides was skepticism. Publishers complained that storing papers in an NIH-funded database only duplicates their current efforts. Patients’ rights advocates said the voluntary policy does little to ensure real access to medical research. For researchers, the policy seems to place them in a professional bind: should they, under "strong" encouragement from the NIH, publish in journals that make results quickly accessible? How might the NIH view a decision to publish in more prestigious journals with more restrictive policies? Certainly the release of the final policy seems more a starting point than a final word. "As a preliminary matter, we appreciate the fact that Dr. Zerhouni and his staff have heeded some of the concerns expressed by the publishing community that called for greater flexibility in the submission and online posting aspects of the NIH public access plan," stated the Association of American Publishers, a chief opponent of the draft proposal. "However, [Friday's] conference call left a number of open questions and we remain concerned about some aspects of the policy."

Michael Eisen, a cofounder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nascent "author-pays" open access publisher and a supporter of the NIH draft policy, said that the policy "should have been stronger in several respects" but added that it nevertheless sets "an important precedent" for all sponsors of scientific research. "The U.S. government has now endorsed the principle that the results of federally funded research should be freely available to the public," Eisen said. "Scientists and the scientific community now have an historic opportunity make this principle a reality."

Members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), a coalition including library groups in support of the initial access plan, also criticized the final policy. ATA member and AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition Board Member Robert Reinhard advocated that the NIH encourage "pursuit of alternative publication venues" that commit to access in the quickest way.
[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), February 8, 2005]

The Association of American Publishers, a chief opponent the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) initial draft policy to make the research it funds freely available within six months, has replied to the NIH’s watered-down final policy. The message: work with us. "Publishers agree with the NIH that science and society-at-large are best served by the widest possible dissemination of published health and medical research," the AAP said. "However, if the NIH’s new public access initiative is to add real value for researchers and patients, it must complement rather than compete with or duplicate the significant advancements and substantial investments that publishers have already made."

Last month, the NIH released a final policy that requested, rather than required, grantees to deposit their papers in PubMed Central with 12 months (see LJ Academic Newswire 2/8/05). The policy succeeded in uniting the two sides of the issue in their dissatisfaction. Proponents of the draft policy feared that 12 months would become the de- facto embargo, and wondered what the final policy would really achieve. Publishers questioned whether the NIH’s request was tantamount to a demand, given that the NIH is a major funder of research. However, just as proponents of the draft proposal have cautiously embraced the new policy- -essentially saying that it is better than no policy– publishers also now seem to be cautiously reaching out to NIH. "We were encouraged that the NIH responded to some concerns of publishers and the research community by incorporating both voluntary choice and flexibility," the AAP said. "As the NIH goes forward with its plan, it must be careful to distinguish a professional and scholarly publishing environment that consistently delivers excellence, integrity, and innovation from one in which "free" access is subsidized through regulation."

To the PLoS Community:

The U.S. National Institutes of Health recently announced its long-anticipated "Public Access Policy," designed to make the results of NIH-funded research freely available online. As of May 2005, the agency will request that all NIH grantees deposit copies of all papers arising from NIH-funded research in PubMed Central (PMC), the National Library of Medicine’s online library of scientific and medical literature. These articles will then be made freely available and fully searchable through PMC within 12 months of publication. (More information about the policy is available at http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm)

PLoS welcomes this announcement. It is an important step for those of us who believe that the results of publicly funded scientific and medical research can and should be made freely available to researchers and the public. However, because of the way the NIH has structured this policy, successful implementation will depend upon the supportive actions of NIH-funded researchers.

Under the NIH’S Public Access Policy, grantees are requested to send a copy of every manuscript describing NIH-supported work to PMC immediately upon acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal. The manuscripts will be formatted for online display, and made freely available through PMC at a time specified by the author. Clearly it would be ideal if there were no delay between publication by the journal and posting in PMC, so that all scientists and the public would have immediate access to NIH-funded research. This is the case for articles published in all PLoS or other open-access journals. However, authors who publish in most other journals may be pressured to delay public posting of their articles or not to post them at all. This pressure must be resisted.

It is critically important that all of us do everything we can to make sure this new system succeeds. Technically, submission of articles to PMC is voluntary, and the policy allows a delay of up to 12 months. However, it is clear that the NIH, Members of Congress, and the public desire and expect full participation. If we fail to meet these expectations, it could undermine the existing broad public and legislative support for scientific research at a time when such support is especially vital.

We therefore urge everyone who receives this message to make your NIH-funded articles available in PMC immediately upon publication. This can be accomplished in either of two ways:

(a) Publish your papers in open-access journals that already deposit their papers in PMC and make them immediately and freely available.

(b) If you publish in non open-access journals, deposit your manuscripts in PMC and exercise your right to stipulate that they be posted online immediately upon publication.

Please share this message with your colleagues and urge them to help foster the success of the new policy. We would be happy to answer any questions, and we again thank you for your attention to and support of Open Access.

Harold Varmus
Patrick Brown
Michael Eisen
PLoS Founders

PLoS Biology is now a year old.  The November issue has 23 research articles, compared to nine in issue one, and articles are now published on-line weekly.  Readership has been steadily increasing, with over 50,000 individual readers (as identified by unique IP addresses) coming to the site in September 2004.  Since going live in October 2003, the PLoS Biology web site has received over 43 million hits.

[SPARC e-news, October-November 2004, http://www.arl.org/sparc]

"Prescription for a healthy journal: take monthly, at no cost; reaches six billion." These are the heady first words written by the editors of PLoS Medicine, which hit our screens for the first time this month. This first issue, with its fascinating variety of commentary, essays, and original research, is about as good as it gets for a global medical journal. With science and research at the core of the journal, the editors have tackled head on the problems that cause a huge disease burden worldwide, with accessible articles about public health and the latest in molecular research in clinical disease and immunology.”

Read the whole review at: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7475/1190-a
(access restricted to UI affiliates and others with subscriptions to BMJ)

The Public Library of Science will more than double in size this year, with new journals scheduled to be published in June, July and September. This week, PLoS officials announced the launch of PLoS PATHOGENS (http://www.plospathogens.org/), now accepting submissions, with its first issue to appear in September. That journal joins PLoS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY (http://www.ploscompbiol.org/), to debut in June, and PLoS GENETICS (http://www.plosgenetics.org/), to debut in July bringing the number of PLoS journals to two to five. PLoS began its open access journal program with a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and launched its first journal, PLoS BIOLOGY in October 2003, adding PLoS MEDICINE last year. PLoS officials say those journals have generated heavy web traffic, although PLoS BIOLOGY, the first PLoS publication, won’t receive an impact factor until later this year.

All PLoS journals are peer-reviewed, and accepted articles are made freely available to the public via the Internet. Authors retain copyright and costs are recouped by a $1500 author charge, which is waived if the author is unable to pay. PLoS officials say that waivers account for less than five percent of articles published thus far, but stress that an author’s ability to pay is shielded from all editorial decisions. While there is still little discernible financial data, one thing is notable in the Public Library of Science’s recent journal launches–the lack of a price increase in an industry where annual price increases have become the norm. Now more than a year since its first journal debuted, PLoS’ author fee remains at $1500. "The publication charge set by PLoS is a reflection of our goals to both remain a non-profit organization while moving towards a publishing operation that will be sustainable within three to five years," PLoS marketing director Cynthia Blair told the LJ Academic Newswire. "PLoS does anticipate reasonable rate increases year-over-year in the future," Blair noted. Still, she said that, in light of PLoS’s business planning, the success of the journals thus far, its open access advocacy efforts, and the launching of new journals, $1500 remains the "best fee for PLoS at this time."
[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), The Publishing Report, March 10, 2005]

The University of California (UC) Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) last week announced the public launch of its new eScholarship Postprints service, which adds peer-reviewed articles previously published in academic journals to the eScholarship institutional repository. The service provides scholars with another option to maximize the availability and thus the influence of their work. But more broadly, noted eScholarship director Catherine Candee, the repository provides "a spark and a model for new forms of scholarly publishing." The postprints are fully searchable, free to the public, and maintained in a centrally managed database. Established in 2000 by the OSC, which is housed within the California Digital Library, the eScholarship repository has proven popular thus far–logging more than one million full-text downloads to date for access to preprints and other research output. Institutional repositories like eScholarship are becoming increasingly important to scholarly communication, a recent example being the National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy that now requests all NIH grant recipients to deposit their research findings into another open-access database: PubMed Central. The eScholarship program, say UC officials, also demonstrates the university’s commitment to preserving the vast output of scholarly and cultural information produced by UC faculty, staff, and students– and acquired or created by its libraries and museums.

Of course, access remains the key issue, and the eScholarship services, including preprints, Candee noted, respond to faculty’s expressed needs. "Negotiations with commercial publishers in 2004 focused faculty attention on the fact that hyper-inflated journal pricing meant a growing percentage of resources were becoming unaffordable and unavailable," she explained. Like a number of large research libraries, in 2003, UC participated in a tense negotiation with industry-leading journal publisher Elsevier, but eventually agreed to a five-year deal in early 2004 that "arrested price inflation" (see LJ Academic Newswire 1/13/04). Although much debate regarding scholarly communication has concerned experimental open access publishing models, Candee noted that many publishers, including Elsevier, have eased restrictions on the posting of preprints and postprints on personal web sites and in institutional repositories, although some publishers, especially in the STM realm, retain restrictive policies. "Many faculty continue to transfer exclusive rights to publishers," she noted, which can mean lengthy embargoes to access, or no access without a subscription. With more publishers easing restrictions on posting, however, better access to research could be closer at hand through initiatives like eScholarship. "The critical change," Candee said, "will come when faculty no longer assign away exclusive publishing rights."
[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), March 8, 2005]

Google Scholar is almost a full year behind in indexing PubMed records, writes Rita Vine, professional librarian, Web search trainer and Web site evaluator. "No serious researcher interested in current medical information or practice excellence should rely on Google Scholar for up to date information," says Vine. The problem is that many medical students and their faculty do, and academic librarians have been hard put to explain the deep limitations of these "quick, one-box tools like Google Scholar and other search engines." Vine says that while it’s widely believed that Google Scholar searches current PubMed Medline records, its search capability tends to peter out after February-March 2004. In fact, in a test on the 2004-2005 period, Google delivered 29,500 records compared with PubMed’s 658,000 over the same time period. "Google Scholar does not search Medline," says Vine. "It searches whatever Medline records NLM happened to give Google. We have no idea when NLM gave Google the records. We can’t anticipate when the next batch will be delivered and the Google Scholar database updated. Remember, Google Scholar is just BETA. PubMed is… well, decidedly NOT beta, and full of the important checks and balances that make it so special." (SiteLines 8 Feb 2005) <http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_02.html#000282>

[ShelfLife, No. 195 (February 24, 2005) ISSN 1538-4284 http://www.rlg.org]

Michael Galperin, an investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes for Health, says "the open database movement is here to stay, and more and more people in the community (as well as in the financing bodies) now appreciate the importance of open databases in spreading knowledge." He coordinated the compilation of the 2005 compendium of molecular biology databases; published by Nucleic Acids Research, the Compendium shows a dramatic increase of 171 databases from 2004, bringing the new total up to 719. Galperin says databases that offer valuable content "usually manage to survive, even if they have to change their funding scheme or migrate from one host institution to another." (Bio-IT World 11 Feb 2005)

<http://www.bio-itworld.com/archive/021105/itin_explosion.html>
[ShelfLife, No. 195 (February 24, 2005) ISSN 1538-4284 http://www.rlg.org]

When the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee held hearings last year on the STM publishing marketplace, some experts suggested that large commercial publishers were causing problems by charging exorbitantly high prices for serials and precipitating what’s known as a serials crisis in academic libraries. This week, however, in an op-ed in London’s GUARDIAN, Elsevier CEO Sir Crispin Davis said the problem is in fact a lack of adequate library funding. "University libraries represent the intellectual bedrock of Britain’s academic institutions," Davis wrote. "But with reduced funding for university libraries, their purchasing power has fallen in relative and absolute terms." Although university budgets in the UK have kept pace with inflation since the 1970s, Davis acknowledged, library budgets have fallen by about a quarter, from an average of four percent to three percent of total university budgets. Meanwhile, scientific article output increased greatly, on the order of three percent annually, now up to roughly 1.2 to 1.4 million articles per year. Of course, according to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), price inflation among STM journals in the UK rose a whopping 364 percent per unit from 1989 to1999. Elsevier, the industry leader, announced a price increase for 2005 of 5.5 percent.

Although some librarians have criticized the pricing practices of large commercial publishers, they would almost certainly agree with Davis’s position that libraries be better funded. "Decreased library funding means that library collections are stagnating rather than growing," Davis wrote, "and this is at a time when research output is growing fast." In response, Davis went on to back the abolition of the VAT tax on research articles in the UK and supported a call for Parliament to commission a study to assess library funding levels and needs. "It could be that the government needs to lay down guidelines on the proportion of university funds that should be set aside for the acquisition of books and journals," he suggested, "or even increase funding to ensure that universities can buy all the material they need." UK universities and colleges, he added, spend £82m (roughly $156 million) a year on subscriptions to journals, less than one percent of their annual research budgets. "If we are to continue to excel in science," he concluded, "funding for libraries must not be left to lag behind the needs of researchers." Davis’s op-ed comes on the heels of Reed Elsevier’s results for 2004, adjusted pre-tax profits of £1 billion (roughly $1.9 billion) for 2004, a rise of 1.7 percent from 2003. To read Davis’ op- ed, visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1418052,00.html
[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), February 22, 2005]