Bill to Require Open Access to Scientific Papers
Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish.
This is a GOOD MOVE.
Yes, it is difficult to get a RESPECTED, peer-reviewed journal that is freely accessible going. ArXiv.org serves its purpose, and our group does post links to the ArXiv.org version of the paper (the same one published in a peer-review journal), but this does not make for an easy searching—as people searching for papers in ArXiv.org have no easy way of knowing whether the paper has been peer-reviewed.
While people work out a way to have more journals available openly, freely, and at no cost (some involving author-paid (which would then usually be covered by grants supporting the research activity) models have been suggested, but I haven’t seen it implemented), the more academic papers we can get out in the open (however lacking it may be at the moment), the better.