[Insight-users] OPEN ACCESS: NIH POLICY EFFECTIVE : Monday April 7 2008

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Torsten,

That's an excellent question.

Thanks for bringing this up.

This is very important in our domain, where most of the papers
are first submitted to Conferences and then "improved" versions
are submitted to Journals.


You are right that "conferences" are not explicitly mentioned in
the NIH notice.  We have therefore submitted the question to
"PublicAccess at nih dot gov". Hopefully we will hear from them
soon.


I would speculate that the spirit of the policy definitely
includes conferences publications,...

but...

let's wait and hear the answer from an NIH official.




    In the meantime,
    hold on on signing those predatory
    copyright transfer agreements, if
    you are still submitting papers to
    Closed Journals or Closed Conferences...   :-)




BTW: I have been trying to calculate how much should
      Journals pay in royalties to the authors of papers.

      My understanding is that a 10% of royalties on sales
      is a standard agreement in the realm of book sales,
      and that a $1 per CD is a standard in the realm of
      music.

      Currently the royalties that authors receive from
      Journals are in the range of 0%. Which clearly sound
      like an unfair exploitation of human labor. This is
      a similar compensation to what is paid to reviewers
      for their intellectual contributions to the peer-review
      process, usually in the range of $0.00.

      The typical copyright transfer agreement of scientific
      Journals, not only doesn't compensate authors for
      transferring their copyrights, but also impose liability
      terms where authors agree to indemnify Journals from any
      copyright infringement claims made by third parties.

      It is questionable then, how Journals get so worked up
      about protecting "their" copyrights, when they "acquire"
      such copyrights for free, by exploiting the creative
      intellectual work of researchers, in many cases at the
      expense of public funds.



     Regards,


         Luis



-------------------------
Torsten Rohlfing wrote:
> Hi Luis and everyone:
> 
> While this is being raised, I would like to ask a question that at least 
> I cannot find answered anywhere in the information provided by the NIH.
> 
>  What exactly is an "article"?
> 
> The NIH FAQ seems to use the terms "peer-reviewed article" and "journal 
> paper" interchangeably, but they are not the same (conference papers are 
> often peer reviewed as well). SO what exactly does the policy apply to?
> 
> Maybe someone enlightened can shine some light on this for me.
> 
> Thanks!
>  Torsten
> 
>> The NIH Public Access policy
>>
>>
>>              http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
>>
>>
>> states that:
>>
>>
>>                    As of *April 7 2008*
>>
>>          *all articles* arising from NIH funds
>>          *must* be submitted to PubMed Central
>>          upon *acceptance* for publication.
>>
>>   
> 
>