An open future for JNCI? Now’s the time…
In a story line out of the post- Reagan excesses of substituting the private sector for governement activity, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), a highly respected research journal for a narrow, exclusive slice of taxpayers, is neither published nor sponsored by the National Cancer Institute(NCI). It participates in Pubmed Central archiving only at the bare minimum of article availability 12 months after publication. It earns significant income and profit for Oxford University Press. It is one of many examples of business as usual where taxpayers subsidize the intellectual content and are told to expect that their investment appears in a clinic or hospital where the promise of cancer research becomes personal.
The history of how JNCI went from public to private property is outlined pretty well on the NCI website with a fact sheet to address the persistent questions that have dogged the privatization since 1996. Under the terms of a 1996 cooperative agreement with NCI, Oxford University Press over a five-year transition gradually took over responsibility for JNCI and became the sole private owner.
Now here is the game changer, I think, if it happens. On May 17th, President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint Harold Varmus, M.D., to serve as Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
President Obama said some very gratious things about Dr. Varmus in nominating him: ““…brings unmatched expertise at all levels — not only in cutting edge scientific research, but also as a leader in the development of strategies for improving patient care, in scientific education and training, and in the design of novel public-private partnerships.”
Another part of Dr. Varmus’ profile is probably creating some sleepless nights for OUP. He is the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of the Public Library of Science, the successful open access publisher; as well as chairs the Global Health Advisory Committee at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Should not the fruits of cutting edge, federally funded cancer research be immediately and readily available to the public and other researchers? I wait to see if Dr. Varmus is successfully appointed and uses this leadership position to advocate for a more open JNCI.
I just checked: only 22 articles from the last 12 months are OA under the Oxford Open Program http://is.gd/d16Zh – that’s about 10% of the items published under the headings Articles, Brief Communication, Correspondence, Comment, Review (not including the News (which is not free with JNCI).
Author Publication Charges have just been increased from GBP 900 / USD 1800 / EUR 1350 to GBP 1275 / USD 2250 / EUR 1900 (40% in GBP/EUR, 25% in USD) for an author based at an institution with a full price online subscription, cf. also my 2009 message to liblicense-l, http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0910/msg00076.html