Whence public access policy, and why?Flashback. The year is some time in the 1980s. The place, southern Indiana. The setting: A meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists.We are being given a presentation, in the business meeting, by a publisher. The publisher points out that the maintenance of a journal (as we had been doing) is expensive and difficult, and the most efficient way to carry out this onerous task was to have the professional publishers do it. The society was promised that members would have inexpensive subscription rates to the journal, perhaps even free for the first couple of years, and the publishing company would take on the task of managing the production of the journal. The journal would, of course, become one of the titles held by the publishing company, with all the rights and privileges and unnecessary boring fine print etc. etc. nevermindthedetails…Flash forward ten years or so. The head of the Libraries of the University of Minnesota is addressing the University Senate on how academics can help get the library out of a bad situation. The situation is that proprietary corporate owned journals are hiking up the subscription rates, forcing libraries to lay off staff, curtail the purchase of new books, shorten access hours, and drop subscriptions. The only substantive suggestion the head of the library could make was this: From now on, try to publish only in your society’s journal, not the corporate owned journals.I sat there in the audience thinking about this, ticking off in my mind which societies existed related to my field, which journals each society ran, and which of those journals had NOT been scarfed up by those publishers systematically visiting the society business meetings about a decade ago…. wait, could it be true? Was what I was thinking even possible?AAARRRRRRRGGGG!!!!!!!It is true! In my field of study, there is not a single peer reviewed journal that is not owned and operated by a commercial pirate, oh, I mean, commercial publishing company! And nobody is getting those journals for free at discount. We are all just getting ripped off royally. Why, oh why, did no one read the fine print! Recently, a simple solution to this problem has come about, which seems like a good model. There are now open access publishing concerns where everything is published on line, and various other factors reduce cost, and the authors pay on publication. The primary example of this is the Public Library of Science (PLoS). You don’t have to be special to have access to this material. It is open access. Free.In the mean time, a somewhat but not entirely related set of events was afoot. This was the development of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy.

The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The Policy requires that these articles be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.

Well, the policy goes into effect this week, so this is officially Open Access Week here on The Internet. We celebrate the beginning of a new era, ushered in by policy that was fought against tooth and nail by the very same pirates, er, I mean, publishers, mentioned above. The Internet is, or course, the original (electronic) public access entity. Why don’t you have a visit over to this site and see what Mr. Public Access himself has going.And from now on, enjoy your new freedom.

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