The OpenHelix Blog

If you haven’t already seen it, open-access publishing either just made a jump backward or forward. The not-so-open access Springer publisher bought Biomed Central, the open access publisher recently. Open access publishing took a huge leap with the passage of a law last year that requires NIH-funded research to be open access and deposited in PubMed central within 12 months of publication. The law hasn’t not met resistence though. Perhaps Springer saw the writing on the wall, so to speak, and decided that buying BioMed Central was a good move in a world were open-access publishing seems to be gaining ground. Or…?  According the BioMed Central FAQ about the buy, BioMed Central publishing will remain 100% open access.

The Public Library of Science was founded in 2001 and published a letter urging publishers to open access to research published in their journals (I remember this letter being presented at an ISMB conference then). PLOS launched a series of open access journals when the response wasn’t particularly enthusiastic from the publishers. Those PLOS journals have had some success since, as have those at Biomed Central, another open access publisher.

There has been resistance from scientific publishers to the open access movement. Some fully opposing it, others like Nature Publishing Group’s official opinion is that it has no position, but that the business model is unproven and peer review an expensive endeavor. Nature has been experimenting with open source models though through the Molecular Systems Biology (an open access Nature journal) supporting self-archiving through public repositories, making an exception for papers reporting genomes and their open text mining initiative.

And now a new development: Wednesday, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which requires all NIH-funded published research to be deposited into PubMed Central (and thus open access) within 12 months of publication.