Information Research Weblog

As readers of Information Research know, I am dedicated to the idea of 'open access publishing', which takes a number of forms, from the 'self-archiving' in institutional archives that Steven Harnad champions, to truly 'open' access in the form of journals like Information Research, which levy no page charges and charge no subscriptions, to 'semi-open' access, such as those journals supported by 'author charging' - which are open to readers, but only available for publishing to those who, in one way or another, can pay the submission fees, to disciplinary 'e-print' archives such as as arXiv for physics, to the latest initiative from the National Institutes of Health in the USA, which proposes:

NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding. This would include all research grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, as well as National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowships. We define final manuscript as the author’s version resulting after all modifications due to the peer review process. Submission of the final manuscript will provide NIH supported investigators with an alternate means by which they will meet and fulfill the requirement of the provision of one copy of each publication in the annual or final progress reports. Submission of the electronic versions of final manuscripts will be monitored as part of the annual grant progress review and close-out process.

The proposal is now going through the legislative process in the USA and the publishers appear to be biting on the bullet and falling in step - but this is medicine, people may die for the lack of information, so they can't very well draw their skirts aside, can they? I wonder what their response would be if the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK made the same proposal?