Just read this news story … Scientific Publishers Offer Solution to White House’s Public Access Mandate – ScienceInsider
It reports on an effort by various scientific publishers to create something they call “CHORUS” which stands for “Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States.” They claim this will be used to meet the guidelines issued by the White House OSTP for making papers for which the work was supported by federal grants available for free within 12 months of being published.
This appears to be an attempt to kill databases like Pubmed Central which is where such freely available publications now are archived. I am very skeptical of the claims made by publishers that papers that are supposed to be freely available will in fact be made freely available on their own websites. Why you may ask am I skeptical of this? I suggest you read my prior posts on how Nature Publishing Group continuously failed to fulfill their promises to make genome papers freely available on their website.
See for example:
- Calling on Nature Publishing Group to return all money received for genome papers and article corrections
- A Solution to Nature Publishing Group’s Inability to Keep Free Papers Free: Deposit them in Pubmed Central
- Please help keep the pressure on Nature Publishing Group to restore free access to genome papers #opengate
- Today is a day to be annoyed with Nature (Publishing Group that is) #NatureFail
- The Tree of Life: Nature’s publishing machine really wants you to pay for stuff even if it is supposed to be free.
UPDATE 6/27/2013
Saw this Tweet
We just published the story yesterday about the 700.000 year old horse that we sequenced. Check it out ! http://t.co/jAym3HLAC0
— Bent Petersen (@bentpetersen) June 27, 2013
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Seemed potentially really interesting. Read the story and got pointed to a new Nature paper on the ancient horse genome. I guess not so surprisingly, despite the fact that they report a new genome sequence, it is not openly available. We really cannot trust Nature on this can we? They could say “Well, this is a draft genome, and we did not mean to apply our policy to draft genomes.” Well, that would be weird since, well, they have applied this to draft genomes before. And then I decided to search for other examples … and in about ten minutes I found a few. See
And this paper too? http://t.co/rCC1A4AKj0 – promises from Nature Publishing Group http://t.co/vlDAd7KFOR not being met #CHORUS
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 28, 2013
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Correction: Here is another non open genome paper http://t.co/X6TgWBKR9u promises from Nature http://t.co/vlDAd7KFOR not being met #CHORUS
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) June 28, 2013