Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008. The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future."

Comments

Re:clever wording

[mrbluze]

Oh, they'll give you free access to all the papers you want. But nobody said anything about charging for the ink. All of the journals I read are published online as well as in print form. Some (such as the BMJ) already open up their papers after a period, but enforcing this to happen within 1 year of publication is _fantastic_ news, because, even if I am 12 months behind my boss who paid for his articles, I am still 4 or 5 years ahead of my juniors who have only just finished reading their textbook.

Re:Not so easy

[backwardMechanic]

Yes, but what are the costs? You write the paper for free, and deliver it in electronic form half-way ready for publication, draw the figures, etc. It's reviewed by your peers for free. It can now be published purely in electronic form (not free, but cheap). Journal publishing houses might as well be printing money - the model needs shaking up.