Re: Victory for the NIH open access plan in the House (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 12:53:13 +0100 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM(a)LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG Subject: Re: Victory for the NIH open access plan in the House There is an excellent summary of the NIH self-archiving mandate and the growing momentum of Open Access (OA) in Information Today, September 15, 2004 "NIH Requires Open Access for Its Funded Medical Research" by Barbara Quint http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040913-1.shtml Information Today is also hosting a Debate on Open Access at the Internet Librarian Internet Librarian International: In London, England Monday 11 October 2004 http://www.internet-librarian.com/Monday.shtml#OpenAccess In Monterey, California Wednesday 27 November 2004 http://www.infotoday.com/il2004/wednesday.shtml#TrackC Barbara Quint's valuable and informative survey devotes more space to the speculations about hypothetical negative consequences of OA http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#17.Publishers than to the actual and growing evidence for the positive consequences http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html which are the real rationale for OA, but these will become more widely known and understood with time. One minor point: I support the proposal to mandate the OA self-archiving of NIH-funded biomedical research 100%! My suggestion (which has nothing to do with the speculations about hypothetical negative consequences!) is only that the mandate's effects will propagate far more widely and quickly to research in fields other than NIH-funded biomedical research if just one small implementational detail is modified: Instead of stipulating that the self-archiving must be done in one central archive -- PubMed Central -- http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&db_id=cp108&r_n=hr636.108&a… it would be far better not to stipulate the archive at all, only that it must be OAI-compliant: http://www.openarchives.org/ OAI-compliance ensures that the growing network of distributed institutional archives http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse is interoperable, and hence functionally equivalent to one global virtual network: http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ If the self-archiving is done institutionally rather than centrally, the practice of self-archiving will spread far more readily across each institution's other disciplines. Compliance with the self-archiving mandate can be monitored and the metadata can even be harvested into PubMed Central, hence nothing is lost, but a great deal more OA is gained: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php The UK self-archiving mandate -- otherwise very much like the US mandate -- got this small but important implementational detail exactly right: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399… Stevan Harnad