Proskauer Rose LLP

SLA

Elsevier

Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers

AAUP

ARVO

Comment: Greetings, this is just a suggestion to make this page a bit more usable:  http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm

It would be super if you could provide hotlinks to the individual journal websites or instructions to authors pages for each journal from that page.

Comment: I very much support this new policy and thank you for enacting it.

I have served on our University Library Committee for 10 years now and enhancing accessibility of the medical literature is greatly appreciated.

Download the full Document: comments_for_sharon_terry_08-may1(final).doc (MS Word - 71 KB)

Comment: I think that public access is very important.  But this latest requirement adds yet another administrative burden to an ever-growing, increasingly complicated tangle.  Consequently, researchers have less and less time to actually do their research, which is particularly onerous in a time of strained budgets.

Comment: I think that public access is very important.  But this latest requirement adds yet another administrative burden to an ever-growing, increasingly complicated tangle.  Consequently, researchers have less and less time to actually do their research, which is particularly onerous in a time of strained budgets.

Comment: the taxpayers pay billions for the work of the nih. and then they get for that closed meetings, failure to get any information on the work that they pay for. this is about as disgusting as it can get. this failure to let the public know what you are doing with their money and how you are spending it for what alleged research results is deplorable.  of course the research funded with taxpayer dollars should be fully available to taxpayers. it should be on the internet within one week after completion. and public comments on that research are equally relevant to the findings.  nih has funded horrible experiments on animals where they were abused. things like 20- years studies on monkeys about smoking - really stupid experiments.t he public wants in on everything that this agency is spending taxpayer dollars on. the public does not want to tolerate continuing animal abuse such as has existed with these very closed, very private meetings like has gone on in the past at nih. that is deplorable as well. especially when the abuse has resulted in absolutely no advances in medicine. abusing animals in labs comes from l500 a.d. medieval times and is decidedly inaccurate.

Comment: I was told that the NIH is seeking input from awardees on the new requirement to submit manuscripts to PubMed Central. I cannot find the link the comments form so am taking the liberty of sending this email instead. I understand and mostly agree with the desire of the NIH and Congress to make publically funded research freely available to the public. However, I disagree with the manner in which it has been done.

My major disagreements are:
(1) It is not clear how PMC will avoid duplication of manuscript versions--it is desirable to have only the final published version of each paper on the web; the current system does not ensure that the PMC version is the final published version.

(2) The format of PMC manuscripts is awful; I never use PMC when I can get the article from a publisher website. Also, going to the publisher website solves the problem in (1).

(3) The NIH has pushed this whole problem on to the backs of authors, who are in a weak negotiating position, rather than work out a common solution directly with publishers. This is a failure of leadership.

(4) There has been no discussion of how to manage the transfer of publication costs from library budgets (indirect facilities and management fees) to grants (direct costs). This cost transfer will be significant, because authors must pay thousands of dollars more per open access article than under conventional publishing agreements. I resent the fact that NIH is forcing a switch to the open access publishing model, without covering the costs, especially in an era when grant awards are going down in real dollars. There is no evidence that universities will step in to cover the gap for individual authors.

(5) There has also been no serious discussion of how to avoid the ills of a vanity press. If authors pay journals the full cost or more to publish their papers, the potential for such abuse should not be ignored. (It won't happen now; the corruption will sneak up on us over the next 10 years so that by the time it is a problem we will think it is "normal".)

I am very disappointed in the way that the NIH leadership has handled this situation. I expected better.