Monday, January 18, 2010

Clarification re Health and Social Care in the Community and NIH compliance

In the December 31, 2009 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, I reported that "Wiley and Blackwell's Health and Social Care in the Community authors show a 0% compliance rate with the NIH Public Access Policy".

The evidence for this statement is based on a time frame of Jan. 1, 2005 - Dec. 30, 2008, reflecting the time frame beginning (roughly) at about the time that articles under the initial voluntary policy would have begun to be published, up until the permitted 12-month embargo period. The basis for this evidence is presented in the open data edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access (see the 3rd worksheet)

It has since come to my attention that there are no articles in Health and Social Care in the Community that should be available under the present mandatory NIH policy, which took effect on April 7, 2008. From this perspective, Health and Social Care in the Community and Wiley-Blackwell authors are not remiss in their obligations.

My apologies for any confusion to anyone who understandably considers the "real" NIH Public Access Policy to be, in effect, the mandated policy beginning April 7, 2008. That this question has come up underscores the importance of mandatory requirement in OA policy.

Update January 19: according to Peter Suber, "In the period since the NIH policy became mandatory, HSCC has had two submissions based on NIH funding. In the first case it deposited the manuscript in PMC within six days of receipt. The second paper was received very recently and is still in process. (Thanks to Cliff Morgan for the correction.)". As of this morning, I am not able to find any articles from this journal indexed in PubMed using the original search. This could mean nothing; it might be a glitch at PubMed, or persistent operator error, i.e. I do not wish to draw any firm conclusions until I retry the search at another time. I re-ran the Dec. 31, 2009 search yesterday evening, and once again found the result of 6 NIH-externally funded articles from 2005-2008 with no fulltext available for any of the articles.

Please note that the compliance rate reported for other journals also reflects the time frame beginning Jan. 1, 2005. To avoid further confusion, I will make adjustments to future searches of this nature.

For details about the search method I use to calculate compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy, see this DGOA post.