Elias Zerhouni
Director, NIH
Dear Dr. Zerhouni,
On January 2, I suggested that the very useful COPR recommendation
to NIH to support open-access journal publication costs would
generate vastly more open-access articles if it were coupled
with an NIH policy encouraging or even mandating open-access
provision using *ether* of the two BOAI strategies, whichever is
suitable, rather than just BOAI-2 (open-access journal publishing):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3350.html
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
May I just add that prcisely the same thing can be said about the more
recent open letter sent to you by Richard Johnson, Director of Sparc:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/resources/OpenAccess-Zerhouni.pdf
Richard Johnson too makes the useful recommendation that NIH should
support open-access journal publishing and help pay the cost, and
so it should. But at no extra cost, NIH can help generate an order of
magnitude more open-access to biomedical research articles if it couples
this support for BOAI-2 with support for the other open-access provision
strategy, BOAI-1, as well.
Sincerely,
Stevan Harnad
On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> Dear Dr. Zerhouni,
>> The COPR recommendation that NIH should follow up on your predecessor,
> Harold Varmus's efforts on behalf of open access to biomedical journal
> articles through PubMedCentral by supporting publication costs in PLoS
> journals is extremely welcome and helpful:
>>http://copr.nih.gov/public_library_science.shtm>> But may I make a suggestion that will substantially increase its
> helpfulness as well as the amount of open access to biomedical journal
> articles that it generates -- at no additional cost to NIH?
>> Publishing in open-access journals such as the PLoS journal -- also known
> as the Budapest Open Access Initiative's open-access provision strategy
> 2 (BOAI-2) -- is only one of the two ways to provide open access to
> biomedical journal articles. And because there are still very few such
> open-access journals, it is not the fastest or fullest way to do so.
>> The other open-access provision strategy, BOAI-1, is self-archiving
> copies of articles published in toll-access journals in the author's
> institution's own open-access archive.
>> Because open-access journals like PLoS exist today for only about 5%
> of the annual number of journal articles published (there are 24,000
> peer-reviewed journals in all, across all disciplines, and only 5% of
> them, about 1000, are open-access journals like PLoS) the solution for
> the remaining 95% is for their authors to self-archive them in their
> institutional open-access archives.
>http://www.doaj.org/>> Fifty-five percent of journals already formally endorse
> author/institutional self-archiving, and many of the remaining 45%
> will agree if asked.
>http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm>> So the power and scope of the COPR recommendation for NIH to support open
> access can be immediately enhanced from its present one (probably better
> than 5% in the biomedical sciences, which includes the biggest
> open-access publisher, BioMedCentral [BMC], hence probably closer to
> 10-15% today) to at least 55% and potentially 100% by simply enhancing the
> recommendation (with no further cost implications) from the present one:
>> 1. The NIH should offer support for PLoS by explicitly stating that
> NIH grant recipients may legitimately apply funds from their
> projects toward the modest publication fees envisioned for PLoS.
>> 2. Consideration should be given to awarding administrative
> supplements to relevant NIH-funded research, if only for a limited
> "introductory" time period, as further means of expressing both real
> and symbolic support for this program.
>> to the following enhanced one:
>> 1. The NIH should offer support for open-access to biomedical
> journal articles by explicitly stating that NIH grant recipients
> may legitimately apply funds from their projects toward the modest
> publication fees envisioned by open-access journals such as PLoS
> or BMC if a suitable one exists for their article. Otherwise they
> should publish it in a suitable toll-access journal and provide
> open access to it by self-archiving it in their institutional
> open-access archives.
>> 2. Consideration should be given to awarding administrative
> supplements to relevant NIH-funded research, if only for a limited
> "introductory" time period, as further means of expressing both real
> and symbolic support for this program. The administrative
> supplements for covering open-access journal-publication costs
> should be available to researchers and institutions that are also
> implementing open-access provision by self-archiving for those
> articles for which a suitable open-access journal does not yet exist.
>> I hope this small amendment to the COPR recommendation can be considered,
> as its adoption would greatly enhance the intended effect.
>> Sincerely,
>> Stevan Harnad
>> NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
> access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
> the American Scientist Open Access Forum (1998-2004):
> To join the Forum:
>http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html> Post discussion to:
>american-scientist-open-access-forum at amsci.org> Archive:
>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html>> Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
> BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
> journal whenever one exists.
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals> BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
> toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
>http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/>http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm>
