Inquiry at the House of Commons

The British parliament is to conduct an inquiry into scientific publication. In December the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons announced that it will be looking at access to journals within the scientific community. In a statement the Committee said "it will be asking what measures are being taken in government, the publishing industry and academic institutions to ensure that researchers, teachers and students have access to the publications they need in order to carry out their work effectively."

"Researchers, teachers and students must have easy access to scientific publications at a fair price," said Ian Gibson MP, the Chairman of the Committee and he promised "the Committee will have some very tough questions for publishers, libraries and government on these issues."

"The committee will discover that many people are expending great energy on resolving this issue," commented Steve Hitchcock of the University of Southampton, UK, adding that "it has the opportunity to make a big impact at the very highest levels if it takes on the challenge of exploring all aspects of Open Access, including university archiving."

The Committee has called for written evidence from the community addressing issues of pricing of scientific journals and steps to promote a competitive market. The Committee is also looking for evidence regarding the consequences of the increasing number of Open Access journals. Evidence should be submitted before mid-February and oral evidence sessions are planned for March.

www.parliament.uk

Individual Open Access Articles on PubMed Central

PubMed Central, a full-text digital archive of the life science literature (see Open Access Now, July 28 2003), has recently agreed to accept individual Open Access articles from journals that are not themselves indexed in PubMed Central. The decision was sparked by a request from Monica Bradford, the executive editor of Science magazine, who asked whether PubMed Central would accept an article by Harold Varmus and others as an Open Access article. Varmus - a founder of the Open Access publisher Public Library of Science - and colleagues are understood to have published the article in Science on the specific condition that it is Open Access.

PubMed Central has set up a special web page to hold such individual Open Access articles and has established criteria for accepting future individual papers: the article must be published in a journal that is indexed in MEDLINE or has three editorial board members with research grants from major funding agencies; and the journal must supply a complete set of electronic files for the article, including supplemental data files. The full text of the article will be displayed in the same way as standard PubMed Central articles, except that the banner at the top of the page will be a common Open Access banner instead of the specific journal's logo. No links will be provided from the article page within PubMed Central to the journal's website. The new procedure should improve access to the limited number of Open Access articles being published by some journals as they experiment with authorprocessing charges rather than subscription fees (see Open Access Now, November 3, 2003).

www.pubmedcentral.gov