"The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."
Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away.
Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade.
The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods.
Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move.
Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.
That's a step, but that's just NIH and isn't instant access. I'd like to see instant access for all government funded research (which would count NSF, DOE, NASA all public universities, etc etc).
The journals are a racket supported by government research. Peer review can be financed outside of locking out people from being able to read the final product.
Slightly offtopic, but isn't it a bit ironic that NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NIH (Not Invented Here) both make perfect sense in this thread!
The Gates Foundation is pushing for a lot less NIH syndrome and a lot more reuse I hope.
"The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."