The big issue this year is the new NIH policy requiring to provide the copy of accepted manuscript resulting from NIH sponsored grant to open access repository in biological sciences database PubMed. As much as I was always thrilled by open access publishing, I am starting to seriously rethink this opinion. New policy requires that every manuscript accepted after April 7, 2007, describing research financed by NIH, needs to be submitted to PubMed. You have some options though. You may send the “dirty manuscript”- your file as of the day the manuscript was accepted - or, in some cases - the final published paper (after proofing, journal style re-wording etc.).

The “case” depends on the journal in which final manuscript is published, or really what copyrights you retained when submitting. The article, depending on your choice of way to submit it, may appear in PubMed right away, or after 6 or 12 months. It may be exactly the same file as published paper, or it may differ quite considerably (but not in the scientific content!).

Of course, the publishers of non-open-access journals worry about their profits, and it looks that they have the basis for that. Some, like American Chemical Society, suggest that you pay $1000 (per manuscript!) to retain the right to open access distribution of that article, and thus it may be published on PubMed (or your own web page for that matter) right away. Seems to be a bit costly to me. As somebody commented today, it is a week or two worth of supplies, not a spare change really.

Now, in the beginning the whole open access was invented as the way to provide to everybody - be it the US taxpayers or whole scientific community even in poor countries - non limited access to all the results, papers and ideas. The question is, if it is not going to block or at least seriously limit the possibility for the scientists in poorer countries to publish in popular, and thus probably expensive journals? They currently have an option, because only NIH requires posting papers, and if you don’t want to buy open access, you don’t have to. The questions is, if paying large amounts of money to have your paper published (which to some extent is already present as per page fee in some journals, but not in many) is not the direction in which the open access movement is going? And this is my impression it may be the case.

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