WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- More than 50 medical and scientific non-profit publishers, representing more than 120 journals, have offered the National Institutes of Health access to their contents free of charge through their current links to the NIH's PubMed Central data archive.
The links actually have existed for more than six years, but only a few journals have offered all of their contents -- newly released and older articles alike -- to non-subscribers for free. The journals embracing this policy for the first time will provide access to studies in plant science, dairy science, dentistry, entomology and ornithology in addition to new areas of biomedical research.
If the NIH accepts, the public would gain online access to 1 million existing research articles that would increase by around 15,000 submissions every month, as well as an archive of 1.7 million full-text articles dating back to 1849.
The 57 publishers approached Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the NIH's director, under the auspices of DCPRinciples, an organization founded two years ago to respond to the open-access movement and the concerns of librarians about the high cost of commercial journals.
Martin Frank, DCPRinciples' coordinator, told United Press International the offer was made because the NIH in February 2005 requested that all scientists supported by the agency's funding send their articles to an NIH archive after the articles were accepted for publication in a scientific journal, but before the journal had a chance to copy-edit the work.
The "Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH Funded Research," as it is called, went into effect May 2, 2005.
Frank said DCPRinciples is concerned that problems will result from edited and unedited versions of the same research existing at the same time; that copyright violations will occur, because the process to ensure articles are not published before their embargo date is not strict enough, and that creating an unnecessary archive will divert funds from needed research.
All of the participating non-profit journals offer free access to their contents, from right away to 12 months after publication, and these datelines would not change, but if the NIH accepts the organization's offer, only copy-edited articles would be released and there would be no problem with copyright issues.
In addition, the public would have access not only to published NIH-funded research, but also to all research the journals publish, no matter what the funding source.
Chris Lynch, vice-president for publishing at the Massachusetts Medical Society, which produces the New England Journal of Medicine and is a member of DCPRinciples, said everyone was on the same side of this issue.
"All of us are trying to disseminate information as quickly and widely as possible within a viable business model," Lynch told UPI. "This offer keeps the valuable work we do correcting and fine-tuning research before it is published intact and that is important. We spend a lot of time trying to get things right for the benefit of the research community."
Dr. David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology and Information of the National Library of Medicine, which runs the NIH's PubMed and PubMed Central, said he was thrilled by the DCPRinciples proposal.
"I think it's wonderful," Lipman told UPI. "What could be bad about it? There's no other side. Of course, we'd rather have the copy-edited article. Our only concern is to make our archive as large as possible and crosslink it in every way we can.
Lipman called this "such an exciting time in science." He said cross-linking information provides "amazing" capabilities.
"We want to make sure that scientists can not only find what they're looking for, but find that extra thing they didn't know about that allows new connections to be forged and new discoveries to take place," he said. "To make that easier, we are trying to add sidebars to our databases like the ones in Google and Amazon that suggest similar books or products of interest. We hope to suggest related data that might interest scientific investigators."
Lipman said PubMed, which contains article abstracts, and PubMed Central, which contains full-text articles from both national and international journals, are currently unique in the world. He added, however, that the NIH has been approached by the governments of Britain, Italy and South Africa, all of whom want to create archives of their own and coordinate them with the one at NIH.
"PubMed and PubMed Central host 1.5 million users and distribute 2.25 terabytes of data every day," he said. "DCPRinciples' offer will increase both those figures considerably. We welcome these new journals."
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A list of the non-profit publishers and the journals they issue, and the letter DCPRinciples sent to NIH are available at DCPRinciples.org.
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Astara March covers healthcare technology for UPI. E-mail: [email protected]
