From: Winston Tabb <[log in to unmask]> Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 05:17:16 +0000 What does "better than the NIH policy" mean? Winston Tabb ----- Original Message ----- From: LIBLICENSE [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 11:14 PM From: T Scott Plutchak <[log in to unmask]> 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 [log in to unmask]