Do Nature's Publishers Even Read Their Own Articles About Open Access?

Failures

from the funny-that dept

Just a few weeks ago we wrote about scientific publishing giant Nature’s somewhat abhorrent open access policy, where it’s telling researchers at universities that require open access publishing that they need to get a waiver from that policy. So it seems rather strange to see that very same Nature, just days later, publishing an article about open access, in which it talks about how two of the largest funders of scientific research today, Wellcome Trust in the UK and the National Institute for Health (NIH) in the US, are starting to punish grant recipients who don’t follow through on open access obligations. Both of those organizations require certain open access standards, but apparently have mostly just trusted researchers to follow through. Not any more:

Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available.

Neither agency would name those who have been sanctioned. But the London-based Wellcome Trust says that it has withheld grant payments on 63 occasions in the past year because papers resulting from the funding were not open access. And the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, says that it has delayed some continuing grant awards since July 2013 because of non-compliance with open-access policies, although the agency does not know the exact numbers.

The report notes that this has resulted in a “noticeable jump in researchers following the rules.” That makes sense.

Of course, nowhere in the Nature article does reporter Richard Van Noorden ever bother to mention that his own publication is fighting against those requirements. In fact, the article reads as if it’s a strong supporter of open access rules:

Some scientists are not even aware that they could be penalized. Nature‘s news team contacted Sheila MacNeil, a tissue engineer at the University of Sheffield, UK, who has published hundreds of articles, including a March 2013 paper on making stem-cell lattices for corneal repair that was funded by the Wellcome Trust (I. Ortega et al. Acta Biomater. 9, 5511–5520; 2013). Nature pointed out that the article should be open access but is not. “This is new to me,” responds MacNeil, who plans to make the paper available. “Agreeing with open access is easy — making it happen, less so,” she says.

Perhaps the Nature “news team” should take a look at how their own publisher is forcing researchers to ignore their open access obligations.

Filed Under: nih, open access, publishing
Companies: nature, wellcome trust