RE: NIH Public Access Policy: funding for full OA already there?

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Ian

Let's, for the sake of argument, round the total figure up to 
$200 million, giving a per paper value of about $3,300.  That is 
roughly 0.7% of the total NIH budget.  The split of 99.3% on 
research, 0.7% on disseminating that research and ensuring that 
anybody who can make use of it has access does not strike me as 
an unreasonable.

David Prosser

Ian Russell wrote:

That leaves an NIH pot of less than $500 per paper. 
Pay-to-publish charges in quality bio-medical science journals 
are mostly at the $2500 - $3000 range (PLoS Biology is currently 
$2750 remember and they are not even covering their costs from 
this). That's a short fall of at least $2000 per paper or $130 
million dollars per year for all of them. That's $130 million 
dollars that could have been spent on research; or that will need 
to come out of the taxpayers pocket; or that will need to 
disappear from library budgets and be moved to the NIH - anyone 
know how that might happen by the way?

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