RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Paul, I believe those (below) are author charges for immediate OA 
via "open choice" type arrangements, rather than fees to submit 
articles to NIH to comply with the 12-month mandate?

To my inquiry the other day to the list about which publishers 
are planning to submit to NIH as part of their regular publishing 
services, I've heard already from about half a dozen who are 
lined up to do this, some larger, some smaller.  I've heard from 
others (society publishers) that they are trying to work with NIH 
to submit articles, but it seems as if the NIH is not smoothing 
the way, for various reasons.  Only one publisher so far will 
levy a (miniscule) service fee for submission to various 
mandating agencies.

Right now we have a kind of mess that needs time to sort out: 
trying to achieve compliance for literally thousands of authors 
and articles in a couple of months (since the mandate was 
announced in January) is a herculean task, when the institutional 
underpinnings (the list of these is substantial) are mostly not 
yet present.  We have a situation in which articles can be 
submitted by (1) authors, many of whom would rather just have 
someone else do it, like the publishers -- btw, the NIH 
instructions for authors are not as helpful as they could be; (2) 
the research institutions, i.e., the ones that already have 
everything in place to do so; or (3) the publishers.  The 
potential for redundancy is huge and it is wasteful.  The 
publishers, most of whom are willing to help if given half a 
chance, are the ones with the redacted articles... seem like the 
most logical funnel to the NIH, if this can be worked out.

Wouldn't it be good if the NIH, the publishers, and the research 
institutions would get into a room together and thrash this all 
out in an sensible way?  Ann Okerson


On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Gherman, Paul wrote:

> At Vanderbilt, our Medical Library has been doing significant 
> work contacting publishers to find out what their policy and 
> procedures are. One discovery is that some of them intend to 
> charge authors between $900 and $3,000 to submit articles to 
> NIH. Some will allow for early posting, if the fee is paid.
>
> Paul
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of T Scott Plutchak
> Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 8:08 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu; liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services
>
> Thank you, Ann, for suggesting this!  I've been puzzling over 
> the same thing.  Might I suggest that it would also be useful 
> if you could get samples of the messages that the publisher 
> will send to the investigator to alert them that they need to 
> go in to approve the submission?  It'll be very helpful as 
> we're preparing information pages for our folks if we can 
> provide them with concrete examples of what to expect.
>
> Scott
>
> T. Scott Plutchak
> Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
> University of Alabama at Birmingham