Publishers Protest at National Institutes of Health

[Nambe]

Reed Elsevier Inc

While supporters of open access hailed a proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make all taxpayer-funded NIH research freely available within six months, representatives of more than 50 publishers visited the NIH offices in early August to voice strong opposition. ..

Rick Johnson, director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), in a letter to NIH director Elias Zerhouni, suggested that NIH had made the right choice and that publishers appeared to "misunderstand the plan, which proposes open archiving, not open-access publication." Open archiving, Johnson said, "is not a threat to journals," as articles in PubMed Central are not the final, authoritative version of the article preferred by authors for citation purposes and that the proportion of open access articles in a typical journal likely would be insufficient for libraries or individuals to cancel their subscriptions.

[LauraK]

1. The drug companies are the ones trying to kill this.

We pay for the research and the patent the results and make billion$ from it.

[RhodaGrits]

2. All I know is that if I want to order a copy of a medical research

paper that is not in a journal for which I have a paid subscription, the cost to my local hospital library is $11.00. Can I protest FOR this???