From: T Scott Plutchak <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:03:40 +0000

I was pleased to see Alicia's reference to the fact that Elsevier has
been depositing final manuscripts on behalf of their authors for many
years.  I recall a conversation I had with someone from NLM about a
year or so into the voluntary policy where he told me that the only
reason that they had reached a 7% compliance rate was because of
Elsevier's voluntary participation.  Without that it would've been
more like 3% to 3.5%.  And remember, this is PRIOR to the mandatory
policy.  I realize this disrupts the convenient narrative of evil
anti-OA Elsevier striving to lock up all the scientific literature in
the world.  I understand how upsetting that must be.

The greatest rhetorical achievement of SPARC (better even than "they
make us pay twice!") has been equating support for OA with support for
the mandatory NIH policy.  This has effectively made it impossible to
criticize the NIH policy without being branded anti-OA or anti-public
access.  But in fact, there is no contradiction between being strongly
supportive of the principle that the tax-paying public should have
easy access to the peer reviewed literature that results from federal
grants, and thinking that the NIH policy is seriously flawed.

I'm reminded that as far back as 2005, a coalition of society
publishers made a proposal to the NIH director suggesting a process
whereby links from pubmed records would be made to the already freely
available articles on the publishers' sites, and the publishers would
provide copies of those articles to NIH for data-mining purposes.
This would have achieved all three of Zerhouni's initial aims, while
driving traffic to the publishers' sites, which was among their
primary concern.  As far as I'm aware, that counter proposal was never
seriously considered.  It ought to be.

Alicia also says, about the introduction of RWA, that she hopes it
will "stimulate reflection about the appropriate role of US government
agencies..."  Personally, I feel that the investment that the federal
govt makes is substantial enough to warrant some degree of regulation
of STM publishing in order to insure public access.  I just want
something better than the NIH policy.  To the extent that the
introduction of RWA does indeed stimulate some serious thinking about
these issues, rather than simply inspiring the parroting of repetitive
soundbites, it will actually have had some positive consequences.

Scott


T. Scott Plutchak

Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
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