NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH PROPOSES OPEN ACCESS POLICY
Some of you may have been hearing more and more
about open access
lately. The Ornithological Council has been tracking this
issue for the past two years and has also been very active in
representing the interests of ornithologists over the past few months.
The issue has heated up because the National Institutes of
Health announced in July that it planned to develop an open access
policy by the end of 2004 and implement it by mid-2005.
Updates:
15 January 2005: NIH was to have held a
teleconference earlier this week to announce the final policy. The
teleconference was cancelled. The NIH will most likely publish the
final policy by the end of January 2005.
Click here
(.pdf file) to read the NIH proposal, which was
published for comment on 17 September 2004
Click here
(.pdf file) to read the comments OC sent to NIH
before the policy was
published for comment
Click here
(.pdf file) to read the comments OC submitted to
NIH on the official
proposed policy
Click here
(.pdf file) to read the BioScience Viewpoint
authored by OC Executive Director
Ellen Paul (republished here with the kind permission of the American
Institute of Biological Sciences)
Why does this matter
to ornithologists?
Although little ornithological
research is
NIH-funded - it is mostly in animal behavior or emerging infectious
diseases - other federal funding agencies will likely adopt the
NIH
model in
short order. As a general principle, more access to
information is good, but the NIH model may so weaken the financial
viability of
some nonprofit scientific societies that they will cease to exist and
their
journals will be lost.
Until other federal funding agencies start to adopt open access
requirements, the impact on ornithological journals will be
minimal.
However, as above, this first policy is likely to be a model for
other
agencies, so we need to be vigilant. The
American Geophysical Union, the American Chemical Society, and a wide
range of other societies whose members do not often receive much NIH
funding are engaged both in the DC Principles, a coalition of nonprofit
scientific societies that support the concept of open access but that
oppose a government-mandated, one-size-fits all policy. In part, no
doubt, they
are engaged because they are also concerned that the NIH model will be
adopted by other research funding agencies, but it is also because
they recognize the need to stand up for the integrity of science as a
whole, even if their organizations are not directly affected. It is
similar to their support on the evolution issue, which many of them
speak out on even though their disciplines are not affected.
In short - solidarity.
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