Washington

The website set up by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide free access to biomedical literature is making moves to quell publishers' unease over the status of online articles.

Organizers of PubMed Central (PMC) now say that participating journals can show free back content on their own websites, rather than displaying full text at the NIH site, as they were previously obliged to do.

PMC's backers say they hope that the policy — announced in an online forum on Nature's website last week and published on page 740 of this issue — will encourage many more journals to participate. So far, the NIH site, which was launched in February 2000, has signed up only eight journals. Organizers say that a dozen more are expected to sign up shortly.

Lipman: looking for compromise?

“This [new policy] is much less scary for a lot of publishers,” says David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH. “Some publishers are just concerned about having their content viewed anywhere but their own site.” Lipman says the policy change, which was made by the PMC's advisory committee late last month, is “a reasonable compromise”.

Journals may now choose to link electronically to PMC, while keeping their content on their own website. In return, they must agree to make original research articles available on their website free of charge within a year of publication, and “preferably” within six months. The change represents a retraction of PMC officials' early insistence that publishers display entire articles at PMC. It comes as several journals, including Science (see Nature 410, 502; 2001), are deciding to post free back content on their own websites, in most cases within a year.

The announcement is the latest development in the debate over how, when and at what price biomedical scientists will be able to access extensive electronic archives of published articles. Those involved in the discussion, including commercial and academic publishers, rebel scientists and librarians, are to meet next week (16–18 April) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state to discuss electronic publishing issues.

The meeting takes place against the backdrop of a threatened boycott by several thousand scientists, who have pledged to stop buying, publishing in or reviewing for journals that refuse to make their research articles freely available within six months.

Some publishers see the change as an acknowledgement by PMC of a failure to recruit the journals it needs to provide a near-exhaustive archive of biomedical literature. “They've lost that battle, now they're waving a white flag,” says one commercial publishing executive, who declined to be identified. “They're saying they'll allow us to not deposit. Well, nobody was going to deposit anyway.”

This executive says the PMC's new policy still does not guarantee journals an adequate return. “They are [still] basically trying to pin publishers down to say 'any income we make we will make in the first six months, at most a year'. That's not a model that most publishers know whether they can accept.”

Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, calls the new policy “a step in the right direction” because it will allow journals to retain material on their own websites. But she bristles at the demand that journals that link to the site make back content free within a year. “I would love the whole world to get [our content] immediately. But our journal would go under if we didn't have money to run it,” she said.

Other publishers say that the change could help the PMC to recruit more journals. Martha Howe, president of the American Society for Microbiology, which publishes ten journals, says that “it may well make participation easier”.