Good News About Open Access PublishingBy George Lundberg, MD, Editor-at-Large, MedPage Today
Published: July 02, 2012
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Transcript:
Hello and Welcome. I'm Dr. George Lundberg and this is At Large at MedPage Today.
"I gave at the office."
I am an American taxpayer just like most of you, the audience. My tax dollars, and yours, fund the great majority of health-related research in the United States, mostly through the National Institutes of Health.
Thus, I, and you, the taxpayers, own the results of that NIH funded research. We paid for it.
Then, why, for goodness sake, do I, the owner, or my physician, another owner, have to buy a subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA or hundreds of other medical journals to read the articles that will help to determine my health?
In 2008, after a lot of pressure from a lot of us for many years, the NIH issued a policy based on new legislation that in order to get an NIH grant, the authors would have to provide a copy of the final version of the accepted article for preservation and use at PubMedCentral, the American repository for electronic open access for medical articles.
Many publishers agreed; some had already placed their articles in PubMedCentral, even immediately.
Because of protests from some commercial publishers, a compromise allowed a delay from the actual date of publication for up to 12 months until open placement, thereby preserving some of their commercial interests.
But on Dec. 16, 2011, a large number of American and European publishers could not leave well enough alone and convinced Orange County Republican Congressman Darrell Issa to introduce legislation to ban the mandate of public access to federally funded research.
Amazingly, professional publishing houses, like the American Medical Association, supported the legislative initiative of the commercial publishers.
But this time they went too far. The genie of the fundamental rightness of open access publishing is now out of the bottle.
So many of the researchers and authors, knowing the huge profits that the publishers have been taking by charging libraries exorbitant subscription prices for so many years for very little "value added," rose up in mass protest.
The proposed American legislation went nowhere.
And on April 25, 2012, Harvard University sent a memo to 2,100 faculty encouraging its researchers to submit their work to open access journals and to resign from the boards of non-open access journals.
Then, a petition to the White House on behalf of open access publishing of government-funded research is garnering huge support with more than 26,000 signatures at writing time.
Check it out. You may even wish to sign on. Movement is positive.
That's my opinion. I'm Dr. George Lundberg, At Large for MedPage Today.
George Lundberg,
Editor-at-Large
Dr. Lundberg is known worldwide as a leader in medical communications.
His editorial work is marked by his distinguished 17-year stint as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and its Archives publications.
Most recently he served as Editor-in-Chief of The Medscape Journal of Medicine, the original open-access general medical journal, and Editor-in-Chief of eMedicine at WebMD.
He also serves as president of the Lundberg Institute, and is a consulting professor of pathology and health research policy at Stanford University School of Medicine.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and serves on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the National Library of Medicine.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Columns/At-Large/33577?
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© 2012 Everyday Health, Inc. All rights reserved.
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PETITION CLOSED; THEY REACHED 25,000+ !!
we petition the obama administration to:
Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education.
Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research.
Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.
The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.
Created: May 13, 2012
Issues: Economy, Education, Science and Space Policy
Learn about Petition Thresholds
Signatures needed by June 19, 2012 to reach goal of 25,000
Total signatures on this petition
27,734
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-free-
access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-
taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ
WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV
Post edited by: Bettyg, at: 07/04/2012 01:06 AM
