One such piece of legislation was introduced in the Senate last year by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) that would require any published paper derived from U.S.-government-backed research to be published online within six months. PubMed Central, published by the NIH—a federal institution—has come under especially intense fire. Their efforts have been dubbed "socialized science," by Rudy Baum, editor in chief of the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Chemical and Engineering News. "Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science," he wrote in a 2004 editorial. "I find it incredible that a Republican administration would institute a policy that will have the long-term effect of shifting responsibility for communicating scientific research and maintaining the archive of science, technology and medical (STM) literature from the private sector to the federal government."
In fact, the ACS paid lobbying firm Hicks Partners LLC at least $100,000 in 2005 to try to persuade congressional members, the NIH, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that a "PubChem Project" would be a bad idea, according to public lobbying disclosures, and paid an additional $180,000 to the Wexler & Walker Public Policy Association to promote the "use of [a] commercial database." It also reportedly spent a chunk of its 2005 $280,000 internal lobbying budget as well as part of its $270,000 lobbying budget last year to push the issue, according to disclosure documents. The ACS publishes more than 30 journals covering all aspects of chemistry, and the organization did not return phone calls for comment.
Efforts for a PubChem Central have come to naught thus far and the NIH's efforts with PubMed Central have met with limited success. Of the as many as 65,000 articles derived from NIH-funded research, only 10,000 or so are available at PubMed Central. "We have authors sending in 4 percent of articles," says Neil Thakur, Ruiz Bravo's special assistant. "An additional 10 to 12 percent are submitted by publications."
"Having been at a research institution, if something is not mandatory for me and I'm a scientist and I'm focused on the science, then doing something like this is not something that I am going to pay attention to," Ruiz Bravo adds. "We could go to a mandatory policy with a six month deadline. We've been considering that."
The open-access movement is not confined to the U.S., of course. The Wellcome Trust in the U.K. has begun providing funds to its researchers explicitly to cover the costs of publishing in open-access journals. And the NIH has signed agreements with international repositories to make its publicly available material available there.
This open-access groundswell, ranging from the physics community's preprint arXiv to centralized, postprint PubMed Central, threatens many traditional publishers, though the most prestigious journals, such as the weekly Nature appear unthreatened. Nature declined to comment for this story (Note: Both Scientific American and Nature are owned by the same company: Holtzbrinck Publishers). Rather, it is the niche publishers that may have the most to lose. "If you are published in a journal that publishes every other month or quarterly and there is mandatory open-access in six months, then, as a librarian, you are going to cancel it," notes Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society (APS), which publishes 14 journals, including the American Journal of Physiology (started in 1898). "We consider ourselves a delayed open-access journal."
The APS makes all of its content free after 12 months or asks authors to pay for immediate free publication online, an opportunity 18 percent of authors have taken, Frank says. He also leads the Washington, D.C., Principles for Free Access to Science group, a coalition of not-for-profit publishers advocating such a middle way. "The author-pays business model has yet to be demonstrated to be viable," he notes. "Something can only be eclipsed if something else has been demonstrated that is better than it."
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2 Comments
Add CommentDear reader we are on the edge of something great on mass! George
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had to laugh when I read about Plos being peer-reviewed. Peer review is the most over-rated scam going. People actually think that being in a peer reveiwed journal means that the paper published is accurate. Not only is that not the case, but it is also no guarantee that the people supposedly doing the peer-review even understood what it was they were peer reviewing. In Plos One's case, I not only cite the fatally flawed David Eagleman paper on duration dilation, but also the attack that Plos One leveled against me (in private) for having dared to have provided a link to the article I wrote that exposes the Eagleman's paper's terminal mistakes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot one person, especially not Eagleman or Baylor College, has even attempted to refute my well read article for the obvious reason that it is filled with overwhelming evidence to support my contentions, which are better researched than Eagleman's basis for his experiment. Thus we have the second part of the problem that plague's science these days - (and perhaps always did) the importance of agenda over scientific accuracy. Plos One finds no problem in deleting a reference to my article in their comments section and then accusing me of at least 5 baseless charges in an email. Never mind that the Eagleman paper not only is bad science at its worse but raises possible ethics questions as well. Questions that I didn't realize until others brought them to my attention after my article was published. Which means by attempting to suppress knowledge of my article, Plos One was also suppressing further insights that went beyond it.
But it's all par for the course in this brave new science world...
On another note - My article's abstract and other writings were published here in the now deleted blogger's community. Scientific American, after asking that we contribute to the community, wiped it out. For those of you who liked blogging in a scientific oriented community environment, I have found a new frontier at www.scienceblog.com . It operates in much the same fashion as the community here did. I have already created a blog there and will be uploading all my former sciam blog entries over there.
Since SciAm took our blogging capability away (after asking us to contribute our time, our minds and our energy to it) this shouldn't be viewed by them as anything competitive.