[A2k] Washington Post Article on NIH Policy

[Manon Ress]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
From: Jennifer McLennan <jennifer@arl.org>
Date: December 21, 2007 9:44:17 AM EST
To: ATA-MEMBERS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR200712200=
2115_pf.html

Measure Would Require Free Access To Results of NIH-Funded Research
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 21, 2007; A33



It is barely a drop of ink in the gargantuan omnibus spending bill
that Congress just passed. But a provision that would give the public
free access to the results of federally funded biomedical research
represents a sweet victory for a coalition of researchers and
activists who lobbied for the language for years.

Under the bill's terms, scientists getting grant money from the
National Institutes of Health would now have to submit to the NIH a
final copy of their research papers when those papers are accepted for
publication in a journal. An NIH database would then post those
papers, free to the public, within 12 months after publication.

The idea is that taxpayers, who have already paid for the research,
should not have to subscribe to expensive scientific journals to read
about the results.

That populist line -- spearheaded by patient advocacy groups seeking
easier access to the latest medical findings and supported by
libraries whose budgets have had trouble keeping up with rising
journal subscription costs -- ultimately overwhelmed objections from
journal publishers. Those firms had complained bitterly that
proponents bypassed the congressional committees that could have
carefully compared the new approach to less disruptive systems for
making information available to the public, some of which are already
being used by other science-funding agencies.

Among the publishers' concerns are that they would lose income from
paid subscriptions, which would undermine their ability to sponsor
educational activities and peer reviews. Of equal concern, they say,
the policy may violate copyright law, a potential legal tangle that
some hinted yesterday might have to get sorted out in court.

"The issue isn't finished yet," said Allan R. Adler, vice president
for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American
Publishers, which lobbied hard against passage. "It's not as simple as
some have made this out to be."

That attitude sounded Grinch-like to Heather Joseph, executive
director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition,
which led the fight for the open-access language.

"The basic reason we went to bat so hard for this was because we
thought it was the right thing to do with taxpayers' science," Joseph
said. "Now there will be $29 billion in taxpayer investments freely
available to the public," she said, referring to the NIH medical
research budget.

The NIH has had a voluntary program in place since 2005 encouraging
grantees to submit their final manuscripts to a publicly accessible
database within a year of publication. Agency officials have contended
that journals would lose few subscribers because most scientists would
not want to wait a year before reading about new research and because
NIH-funded research is but a small fraction what most journals offer
on their pages.

But as of September, only about 5 percent of eligible scientists have
bothered to participate in the voluntary system. That inspired
proponents to push for the congressional mandate.

"Mandatory deposition is a natural next step in NIH's efforts to
ensure public access to the research it funds," said Matthew
Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central, which publishes more than 180
online scientific journals.

Cockerill noted that other major funders of research, including the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, based in Chevy Chase, and the Medical
Research Council in Britain, recently instituted similar open-access
requirements for grantees.

The NIH will now start working out how to implement the legislation, a
process that could take six months, said John Burklow, NIH
communications director. "Our main goal right now is to make sure
everyone understands the policy and knows how to follow it" once it
comes into effect, he said.


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Manon Anne Ress
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Il vaut mieux remuer une question, sans la d=E9cider, que la d=E9cider,
sans la remuer.
Pens=E9es, essais, maximes et correspondance de J. Joubert  p.249
http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/Visualiseur?Destination=3DGallica&O=3DNUMM-88671
Translation: It is better to debate a question without settling it
than to settle a question without debating it