Depth-First: ACS and the NIH Public Access Policy: Clarification at Last

ACS and the NIH Public Access Policy: Clarification at Last

Rich Apodaca — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:27:00 -0400

An alert Depth-First reader pointed me to the new ACS policy for authors receiving NIH funding. The details are contained in a document outlining two ways authors can choose to comply with the new law requiring recipients of NIH funds to deposit a copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into PubMed Central. The choices are:

Publish the article under ACS Author Choice by paying a fee. The ACS will then automatically deposit the article on behalf of the author.
Publish the article using the standard procedure, but with the ACS granting authors the right (and responsibility) to deposit their manuscripts in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

Under Option 2, copyright remains with the ACS - authors are simply granted an exception to enable them to comply with federal law. This means, among other things, that ACS retains the right to prevent third parties (including authors themselves) from creating derivative works of deposited manuscripts, and from redistributing them.

For better or worse, the federal government is now in the scientific publishing business. What remains to be seen is the extent to which this new publisher has the power and ability to deliver on the high expectations of many in the scientific community.

"ACS and the NIH Public Access Policy: Clarification at Last" by Rich Apodaca

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:06:43 -0400

Bill - this discussion brings up the very important subject of just how much value scientific publishers are really adding in the digital age.

For example, the journal Organic Letters uses a Word template that looks very similar to the finished article. Having published there myself, I can say that the amount of editorial input, aside from reviewer comments, can be quite minimal. What I produced with the template looked almost identical to what got published.

Other journals, such as Tetrahedron Letters accept manuscripts in 'camera-ready' form. Your manuscript will essentially be directly incorporated into the finished volume.

In these cases, what the publisher is doing amounts to not much more than what NIH will be doing: collecting the manuscript; formatting it for consistency; and posting it to a Web site.

NIH won't be making a paper copy, but given a couple of years, that too will pass from scientific publishing. We're practically there already.

And PMC won't be doing the peer-review part. OTOH, if PMC is implemented right, the service can offer powerful new peer-review mechanisms that simply have no counterpart under today's 'standard' publication system.

Given what the term 'scientific publishing' involves today, I still think it's accurate to call what the NIH will be doing with PubMed Central 'scientific publishing'.

"ACS and the NIH Public Access Policy: Clarification at Last" by bill

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:55:04 -0400

Maybe I'm just playing semantics... I still see the govt involvement here as being separate from publishing. Pick a paper, any paper -- it was published IN the Journal of WhateverItMightBe, and published BY whoever owns that journal. The govt is only saying that if they paid for the research that paper reports, then it also must be available via PMC. The onus is on recipients of public funds -- publishers need do nothing at all, as they are not even mentioned in the new law.

I think the larger issue, though, is that the new law allows publishers like the ACS to keep PubMed Central from being truly OA. As Peter Murray-Rust recently observed, you can't do a damn thing with PMC content except read it, one pair of human eyeballs at a time. All the possibilities of text- and data-mining are, for now, unrealized and unrealizable.

P.S. got something that looked like Pinyin this time -- "Jinguji"!

"ACS and the NIH Public Access Policy: Clarification at Last" by Rich Apodaca

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:33:14 -0400

Bill, funny about reCaptcha - but you can use the refresh button to get another pair of words to solve if you'd like.

Scientific papers written by employees of the federal government are written and published, but that's not what I was getting at.

The federal government is now a publisher of scientific works written by non-government scientists, very much like Elsevier, Wiley, the ACS, or Nature Publishing Group. They're involved in collecting manuscripts. They're involved in formatting those manuscripts to meet certain editorial requirements. And they are distributing those manuscripts, with all of the responsibilities that doing so brings with it.

If those aren't the activities of a scientific publisher, then what are?

"ACS and the NIH Public Access Policy: Clarification at Last" by bill

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:22:29 -0400

For better or worse, the federal government is now in the scientific publishing business.

I really don't see how you arrive at this conclusion. Could you point me to a scientific paper that the govt has published?

P.S. did you know your recaptcha is showing words in German? If I didn't know the words, with that line through them I don't think I'd be able to read them.