"I agree with public access, but it doesn't have to be immediate," he adds. "If it's immediate, it has to be paid for."
For example, the NIH could pay for publication as the Wellcome Trust does. At $3,000 per article that translates to roughly $200 million a year. "That's not a lot of money compared to $28 billion," the NIH budget in fiscal year 2006, Frank notes, "but that represents 100 research grants." Dezenhall expressed a similar sentiment in his memo to publishers: "In theory, this may provide free taxpayer access to research that they fund, but they will pay eventually with substandard articles and their money being used to develop and maintain an electronic article depot rather than to fund new research."
Regardless of the "attack dogs" hired by traditional publishers to craft their message, public access advocates remain undeterred. "We've got the technology to make this happen with the Internet. The only thing that's holding it back is this adherence to an old business model, which made sense in the world of print, but no longer makes sense," PLoS's Patterson says. "It's great for authors: anyone with an interest in their work can access it."
"There are some folks who feel very threatened by PubMed Central," the NIH's Ruiz Bravo adds. "We really are committed to having an archive. We will do everything we can to make this a successful endeavor."
"Change is in the wind, and change is hard," she continues. "I think this is inevitable."
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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.