An author’s choice
T
he rules changed on April 7, 2008. On that day, a U.S. congressional mandate became effective that now requires principal investigators with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to submit (upon editorial acceptance by a journal) the final, peerreviewed manuscripts to NIH’s digital archive, PubMed Central (PMC), for open availability within 1 year of publication. This revised NIH Public Access Policy has changed the publishing landscape for our NIH-funded authors. But any ES&T author may choose to have the American Chemical Society (ACS) make his or her final published article open immediately upon publication on the ACS website by participating in ACS AuthorChoice—an author-pays, open access option. Participation in that option has the added benefit that ACS will deposit the final published article with PMC on the author’s behalf, for open availability to the public from that repository, with no embargo period. Participation in ACS AuthorChoice entails a fee ranging from $1000 for ACS members affiliated with an ACSsubscribing institution to $3000 for an author who is neither—rates that are competitive with other open access publishing options. And authors who elect the ACS AuthorChoice option obtain the explicit right to deposit published articles on their personal homepages and in any institutional repository of their choosing, not just PMC. (More information about the ACS AuthorChoice program can be found at http://pubs.acs.org/4authors/ authorchoice.) Current NIH guidelines allow investigators to charge the publishing fee for ACS AuthorChoice to NIH grants and contracts; in some cases, institutions are willing to pay for the open availability of an author’s publication. In sum, the ACS AuthorChoice option ensures that anyone with web access can view and download sponsored articles for free. If you have NIH funding and you publish in an ACS journal, you can choose to pay the fee and use ACS AuthorChoice, or you can submit the accepted peer-reviewed manuscript to PMC on your own through NIH’s Manuscript Submission system. In addition, I am pleased to report that ACS is readying to announce an option for NIH authors to empower ACS to submit their final, accepted, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PMC for free (or at a nominal cost for nonmembers). A quick scan of the May 1 issue suggests that few ES&T authors have NIH funding (only one article acknowledged partial support from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences [NIEHS], out of 51 articles published). But even in the absence of an exhaustive analysis, we can predict that the number of NIH-funded authors can be expected to grow, particularly as more environmental scientists seek funding from the (relatively)
© 2008 American Chemical Society
more lucrative health sciences. Recent ES&T publications on the effects of nanoparticles and emerging chemicals in the environment demonstrate the potential for funding from health-related agencies (see the ES&T December 1, 2006, special issue on emerging contaminants). Congress mandated participation in PMC partly in response to the open access movement and the notion that health research published with federal funding should be widely and openly available to the public. Public availability of research information is a potent idea that’s gaining momentum. Congress’s action may represent a slippery slope eventually resulting in all governmentsponsored research undergoing the same open access requirement. But if journals make all their contents free and open to the public, they run the risk of losing paid subscriptions, which is how they currently pay for the peer review, processing, revision, editing, graphics, posting, and archiving of the journal’s contents. Open access journals typically accomplish public availability through an “author pays” system—they charge a fee to the author or sponsor either at the time of submission (as a processing fee) or at the time of publication (as the equivalent of “page charges”), or both. These fees, even when subsidized by philanthropic or other third-party support, often amount to $1000–3000 per article. (By comparison, ES&T is supported by electronic and print subscriptions and has no page charges, a policy that allows free and open access for any author to submit articles for publication.) Some society publishers have undertaken the open accessibility of their journal content after a certain period (say, 6–12 months). With encouragement from the editors of many ACS journals, the ACS strategic plan calls for experimentation with open access models and with approaches for making published articles more accessible. ACS AuthorChoice, ACS Articles on Request, and the new program for ACS placement of final peer-reviewed manuscripts on PMC for free are elements of that experimentation. And what about this editor? In an ideal world, I would prefer open accessibility of all our content. After all we, as authors, want the maximum number of people to read our articles as soon as possible. But in the meantime, ACS AuthorChoice represents an innovative program that makes compliance with the new congressional mandate easy for me as an author. I’m using it on my next paper with NIEHS sponsorship, and I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. Jerald L. Schnoor Editor
[email protected] July 1, 2008 / Environmental Science & Technology ■ 4617
