United Press International - Monday, December 06, 2004
Dee Ann Divis, Senior Science & Technology Editor

NIH is proposing to post journal articles based on the research it supports on its PubMed Web site, where anyone can read and search them without a fee.

In interviews with United Press International, both opponents and proponents of the plan appeared inclined to accept NIH's implementation of the plan, though there may be some changes to the details. All of those contacted said they are expecting a decision by Jan. 1, 2005. That date may be somewhat ambitious, because NIH has promised to review more than 6,200 comments that have been submitted by the public during the recently ended 60-day comment period.

The plan has garnered the support of patient advocates, who say the desperately ill cannot realistically access or afford to buy the specialized articles. University librarians, bitter over more than a decade of skyrocketing costs, also support the idea. Years of prices increases have pushed many annual subscription fees for a single publication to $5,000, with some as high as $10,000 to $20,000 yearly.

The prices and some contracting practices by large publishers have strained tight library budgets severely, forcing many institutions to make decisions each year on what publications to drop. Scientists at such institutions are left high and dry, swapping access or begging copies from colleagues to keep up with their field.

The NIH plan is opposed by large publishing companies whose profits are tied to controlling access to the articles -- even to the extent of who can read them in a library -- and charging for both paper copies and electronic archives.

By all accounts, the publishers have fought furiously to stop the plan, intensely lobbying both NIH and Congress. An attempt to script a colloquy on the floor of Congress, which was intended to limit the plan by displaying how legislators it scaled back, did not go as hoped. Complaints about the process -- supplemented by a lengthy legal brief questioning the legality of various aspects of the plan -- appear to have had limited impact so far.

Both the publishers and the plan's proponents do agree on two points: the need to protect the peer-review process essential to science, and the need to protect the scientific societies who perform peer review and help train upcoming generations of scientists.

The societies publish journals as well, but many are done internally and not through large publishing outfits such as Reed Elsevier or Wiley. These groups worry they will be financially hamstrung if much of the content of their journals is made available for free. Many of these societies do not charge exceptionally high subscription fees and some journals are published less frequently. For some, the journal is their only real membership benefit.

To help protect the societies and help the other publishers, the NIH will delay posting the articles until six months after they appear in a journal. Starting the clock after the article appears should help protect journals that only publish quarterly.

The new NIH plan has changed somewhat from the one originally proposed last July in the House of Representatives as part of their fiscal year 2005 appropriations bill for NIH's parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. NIH has dropped the congressional notion that journal articles be posted immediately if the publishing costs were being partly paid by NIH.

For its part, NIH will remove the initial manuscript and replace it with the final edited version at the publisher's request. Substantive changes can take place during the editing process, an issue the House language did not address.

The House also would have required researchers to submit their articles, not just request a copy, as NIH plans to do.

The distinction makes little difference, said Howard Garrison, director of the Office of Public Affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Though not all FASEB societies feel strongly about the NIH proposal, many oppose it.

"Certainly 'request' is much better than 'require,'" Garrison told United Press International. But "when you are dealing with your funding agency, it is hard to see that as a request."

Some members of Garrison's organization and others in the community are worried the landscape will continue to change. Many are concerned other research funding organizations will follow NIH's lead and mandate open publication of their affiliated journal articles. NIH funds only 10 percent of biomedical research, but policy changes at a handful of key organizations could put large swaths of research into open forums.

As far Sharon Terry is concerned, that would be fine.

Terry, president and CEO of the Genetic Alliance, is a leading advocate of free access. Though she now is a high-profile patient advocate, and has been promised access to any article by publishers, she still has trouble, she said.

"(The publishers) claim that anybody with a personal need would get the article," Terry told UPI. "When I talk to the people in the support groups I work with, they are surprised at (the promise of access), because that is not an obvious thing on any of these Web sites ... The few times that we did try that we did not hear back."

Terry said the current process creates "huge problems. In the last week I've tried 30 times the access articles I couldn't get ... It's over and over a problem for us."

E-mail ddivis@upi.com

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