Perspectives in Psychiatric Care Vol. 41, No. 2, April-June, 2005 49

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.Oxford, UKPPCPerspectives in Psychiatric Care0000-0000© Blackwell Publishing 2005412

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

EditorialEditorial ppc. April/June issue

Editorial

The Public-Access Movement

A bill, approved by the House and the Senate and signed by President Bush on December 8, 2004, requires open access (OA) to articles based on research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Thus began the open-access movement that has been embraced by more than 30 nations plus a few major publishers of professional journals (i.e., Elsevier and Sage). Under this policy, NIH requests that investigators voluntarily submit, electronically, the peer-reviewed author’s copy of their scientific manuscripts 6 months after the publisher’s date of publication. NIH will make this copy publicly available through PubMed Central (PMC). The policy is intended to help ensure the permanent preservation of NIH-funded research and make it more readily accessible to scientists, physicians, and the public.

Open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing price (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions) “allows any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself” (Suber, 2005, p. 1). Copyright will only serve the purpose of giving authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Some publishers already provide full OA, some provide hybrid models, and some are considering experimenting with it. Others are opposed and object to the use of PMC. They suggest that Congress allows grantees to put the literature elsewhere, either in multiple repositories or in any repository that meets certain conditions. The groups that oppose the plan tend to be those that publish subscription-based

journals. Several concerns have been raised. Will this plan:

■

Cause journals to lose subscribers?

■

Restrict the freedom of authors to publish in the journals of their choice?

■

Affect peer review?

■

Lead to government censorship regarding what is published?

■

Be a threat to copyright laws?

NIH responds to these concerns with thoughtful answers. The plan makes important concessions to publishers precisely in order to preserve subscriber incentives. They believe that the effect is a reasonable compromise between competing interests. The plan does not regulate publishing or tell publishers what they must do. It only regulates grant recipients. It adds one more condition to the grant contract between a funding agency and its grantees. NIH believes that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan because they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period. Most issues of most journals publish other than NIH-funded research, including letters, editorials, opinion pieces, review articles, book reviews, news, and conference information. None of these would have to be deposited in PMC. NIH cites that some journals report an increase in subscriptions as a result of the heightened visibility, impact, and usage of the journal’s articles.

According to NIH, peer review should not be a problem. The plan only applies to articles accepted at peer-reviewed journals, and the peer review will be conducted by those journals as they see fit prior to the article being deposited in PMC.

The argument for public access to publicly funded research is a strong one. NIH has articulated how OA serves the interests of many groups. OA enlarges

50 Perspectives in Psychiatric Care Vol. 41, No. 2, April-June, 2005

Editorial

authors’ audience and increases the visibility and impact of their work. OA gives readers barrier-free access to the literature they need for their research. It is convenient, increases reach and retrieval power, and gives barrier-free access to the software that assists readers in their research. OA puts rich and poor teachers and students on an equal footing for these key resources and eliminates the need for permissions to reproduce and distribute content. OA increases the visibility of faculty and institutions and advances their mission to share knowledge. OA makes journal articles more visible, discoverable, retrievable, and useful. OA journals can use this extra visibility to attract submissions and advertising, as well as readers and citations. OA makes the results of the funded research more widely available, more discoverable, more retrievable, and more useful. OA also promotes democracy by sharing government information as rapidly and widely as possible. OA gives citizens access to peer-reviewed research (most of which is unavailable in public libraries) and gives them access to the research for which they have already paid through their taxes. It also helps them indirectly by helping the researchers, physicians, manufacturers,

technologists, and others who make use of cutting-edge research for their benefit.

Advanced practice psychiatric nurses fit into most of the above categories and stand to benefit from the free and easily available data online. Awareness of the issues raised and the concerns of publishers and authors are critical, particularly when the institution, researcher, or author is you. There are several excellent Web sites that give up-to-the-minute information and intelligent discussion of the pros and cons of this innovative use of modern technology. There is also a directory of open-access journals (http://www.doaj.org/) that has 1,433 journals and 63,037 articles available in all subjects and languages. Check it out for all your research needs.

Mary Paquette, PhD, APRN, BC

Reference

Suber, P. (2005)

NIH Public-Access Policy

[WWW document]. URLhttp://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm [accessed onFebruary 2, 2005]