NIH Adopts Open Access Scientific Publishing

The scientific publishing industry is in a period of upheaval. There is a growing movement in the Academic community towards open access publishing, a concept pioneered by folks like Michael Hart who founded Project Gutenburg in 1971. This movement has now grown (along with the internet) into a force that cannot be stopped.

The Math & Physics communities got in the act early with their preprint archives and the Biology/Medicine communities have now begun to embrace the concept with new open access journals like the Public Library of Science (PLOS). A useful time line and history of the open access publishing movement can be found here.

Well, the gloves are off now. On Feburary 3rd, 2005, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a new policy statement calling for all publications resulting wholly or in part from NIH funded research to be published in an open access database, PubMed Central, maintained by the NIH. The new policy comes into effect on May 2nd, 2005.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan "The times they are a-changin!"

First, a short primer on how scientific publishing typically works:

*A government or private foundation or corporation (often a mixture of these) funds a research team to work in a particular area.

*The scientists make a discovery or create a new theory and write a manuscript.

*The manuscript is submitted to a journal for peer review and publication. The journal may be non-profit (typical for Academic Society journals) or for-profit (e.g. the Nature Publishing Group).

*The journal sends the paper out to scientists expert in the subject area who provide a scientific assessment of the significance as well as technical accuracy of the article. This is known as peer review and is typically done for free.

*The editor of the journal makes a (sometimes arbitrary) decision as to whether or not to publish the manuscript.

*The reviewer comments are sent to the authors, who make corrections (if requested by the reviewers). The authors submit a corrected version of the manuscript to the journal, along with a copyright transfer form, signing over copyright to the Journal. Often the author also pays publishing charges for pages printed and color figures (often $500-$1000 per article).

*The journal edits the manuscript to fix grammar, spelling, and format the paper to the style of the printed journal. This copy-edited version, the galley proof, is returned to the authors for final minor corrections and then is published by the journal as the final printed version.

*The authors sign a form that entitles them to a few free reprints (usually 25 or so) and the journal offers to sell the authors additional copies (reprints) of their own scientific work at outrageous prices. The author is usually forbidden to publish the final printed version of the manuscript on the web.

*Libraries pay extortionate prices to the journals for subscription fees to the journals. Only people with personal subscriptions, or have University online access rights, or physical access to libraries with the journals can read the journals.

The new policy of the NIH, although not legally binding (it only requests that NIH funded researchers comply) will likely induce all biological researchers in the US to submit all their publications to the new open access database. There are two reasons for this: most researchers are dependent upon the NIH for some portion of their research funding and you don't bite the hand that feeds you; the vast majority of scientists want people to read their published work and this provides a mechanism for both scientists, and the public at large to do so.

The version of the manuscript that is submitted to the archive is the final version before signing over the copyright to the Journal, the version that has not been copy edited and is solely edited by scientists (authors and peer review). If the journal wishes, they can replace the authors version of the manuscript with the final printed version.

There is a lot of debate as to how this will change the scientific publishing industry. Ironically, the article covering this debate in the current issue of Nature is available only to premium subscribers. The new policy may weaken some journals that rely upon subscriptions and advertising to pay publishing costs (and make profits). This could lead to fewer professional journals that correct grammar, provide commentary articles to clarify scientific findings for non-experts and generally publicize science to the public through the media. I personally doubt this will be a problem as there are only a few such journals (like Nature, Science, JAMA, NEJM, The Lancet etc) and they will likely remain strong for various reasons such as their high prestige and impact factors. I suspect the weaker of the "for profit" journals will suffer. These will likely get replaced with non-profit Journals over the next 10-15 years.

In my opinion, this policy announcement is a major advance. It will bring much more information to researchers at institutions that cannot afford subscriptions to many journals, it will open up vast repositories of information to the public at large and thus will promote the advancement of science. It will likely push "for profit" journals into providing value added services to the community (like media promotion and analysis/commentary and perspective) that make them valuable contributors to the scientific enterprise, and not parasitic leeches on the research budgets of funding agencies.

There are some bigger issues lurking within this policy that will impact the areas of copyright law and interpretation of fair use. I hope other funding agencies and nations follow this example and finally free the primary scientific literature from the shackles of greed.

It is a great great day!