JournalFire Blog

The Senate on October 23 approved a bill containing the provision to require all NIH funded research to be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. In addition, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) withdrew his two amendments which would have rendered the provision ineffective. Thank you to all those who contacted their representatives during the eleventh hour. While this a great victory for Open Access, the struggle will likely continue since all indications are that the White House will veto the bill.

The Library Journal Academic Newswire provided a brief summary of the outcome and the three year history of the proposed NIH legislation (Thanks to Peter Suber). Excerpt:

Despite heavy lobbying from publishers against the public access provision, as well as White House opposition and the threat of two last-second amendments to gut it, the legislative battle culminated yesterday with overwhelming approval of the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill (75-19). If enacted with the NIH language fully intact, the law would require NIH researchers to deposit their papers in the NIH’s PubMed Central database to be publicly available within a year after publication.

The legislative process, however, is far from over. The bill must now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar public access provision. Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet this fall. The final, consolidated bill will then have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President, where it is expected to be vetoed. Although the public access provision enjoys broad support, and the LHHS appropriations bill passed with hefty margins, the House bill passed with 279 votes, 11 short of the number needed to override a presidential veto.

Nevertheless, SPARC executive director Heather Joseph said even with many hurdles remaining, passage by Congress was “a milestone.”

Indeed, getting a public access policy at NIH through Congress has been a three-year odyssey for SPARC, an early and integral champion of the policy. The initially proposed NIH policy was introduced in 2004 as a mandatory policy with a six-month embargo. In a bitter setback, it was gutted at the eleventh hour, and implemented in 2005 as a voluntary measure. Lawmakers and advocates, however, vowed they would monitor the policy’s effectiveness. By 2006, the policy was failing so spectacularly (less than five percent of individual investigators deposited papers) that it no doubt helped marshal the heavy bipartisan support for the revised NIH policy passed on Tuesday.

[...]

Publishers, meanwhile, remain opposed to the NIH policy, contending it could undermine scholarly publishing, and they will likely have more opportunities to fight the public access mandate, either during reconciliation and/or if the LHHS appropriations bill is vetoed. They have also laid the groundwork for a legal challenge to the suit centered on copyright. While copyright experts doubt that claim could ultimately prevail, it could nevertheless delay implementation, giving publishers another chance to organize opposition in 2009.

The U.S. Senate is currently considering a bill to require all National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research to be made publicly available via PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. The bill has already been approved by the House and by the Senate Appropriations Committee. However on Friday, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) slipped in two amendments aimed at either removing the policy or adding language such that the policy is made ineffective. U.S. citizens can take action by contacting their representatives online by using the American Library Association’s online action center and providing a zip code.

Until recently, large media publishers controlled what we read, listened to, and watched. Now blogs, podcasts, and Youtube have put the users in control. Unfortunately science has lagged behind. Publishers still act as the primary filter of scientific information, with some top-tier journals rejecting up to 83% of submitted papers even before they are sent to peer review. Combine this with the fact that grants and faculty positions often hinge on the number of publications one has in these top journals, and the result is that a handful of people have tremendous impact on the global scientific agenda. Journalfire exists to put scientists back in control of science.

Journalfire provides a centralized location for you to share, discuss, and evaluate published journal articles. You, the scientists, are put in charge of determining what studies are significant and noteworthy.

Use Journalfire to create groups to share articles and ideas with scientists in your lab or from around the globe. Currently Journalfire links to every article in the PubMed database, with access to more databases on the horizon. When discussing articles, you decide whether the discussion is public or private, and whether or not to use your name or remain anonymous. Journalfire creates a permanent open access record of each discussion and links it directly to a specific article or group. See what articles your colleagues are discussing in their groups, and see what comments are being made about the papers that interest you most, including your own.

Journalfire provides a new way to assess scientific merit. The value of a journal article is often first assessed by the name of the journal in which it appears. Unfortunately, this is typically determined by fewer than five people. Journalfire offers a more democratic approach. By enabling you to evaluate published articles, the combined opinion of the scientific community can be used as a measure of scientific merit.

Journalfire search results take into account several criteria, including the amount of discussion an article has generated and the rating an article has received. Thus Journalfire enables you to quickly find the papers that other scientists are talking about, or papers that may have otherwise slipped through the cracks.

Journalfire was created by a group of graduate students who were frustrated with the current system of scientific discourse and publication. We believe Journalfire is a step in the right direction towards a more open and democratic scientific community. If you’d like to join us, visit journalfire.org.