Public Access Week: Personal Summary

The new NIH Public Access policy started this past Monday. Fellow Nature Networker Graham Steel has summarized this week's reaction of the blogosphere. I would like to highlight some of the discussions we had here on Nature Network.

Bob O'Hara wonders about the cost of publishing in Open Access: Show us the Money!. He argues that shifting the costs from reader to author can create problems. Most authors, especially those with limited resources, would be reluctant to pay submision fees if they can also submit to a journal without those fees. But the reader-pays model could give authors more bargaining power with journals. The post created an interesting discussion about the different aspects of publishing costs

Graham Steel pointed out the Second European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine that takes place in Oslo September 4-6 in Oslo, Norway. The conference focusses on open access and bibliometrics.

I wrote two blog posts about public access. In Germany, most research organizations have signed the Berlin Declaration, but in contrast to the new NIH policy, there is no mandatory public access. In another blog entry, I looked at public access to my own research papers – most of them are only accessible for those with institutional journal subscriptions.

What is the next step for me? That I need to learn more about self-archieving – both the policies of the journals I have published and the institutional repository at my university.