The State of the Industry

long-term?

In its present form, the Open Access proposal will have a very significant impact on a lot of small publishers who depend on NIH-funded research to supply articles for journals and content for new books. The raw, unedited, unreviewed information will be published and made accessible to the public without allowing publishers an opportunity to commercialize the information or profit from its distribution. The critical information stream for new information will dry up.

Is there anything medical publishers can or should do about this?

Two programs are in place already, which more than satisfy all of the objectives of the NIH proposal. One is the Digital Object Identifier (DOI)—which would allow NIH to track all of their funded research. And the majority of medical publishers voluntarily participate in this program. Second is CrossRef, which links the DOI to the status of the information on a publisher's Web site.

All the publishers have to do is provide access to the abstract of an article, rather than the full text. This doesn't undermine the economics of the publishing process as the NIH proposal does.

All of the medical associations … are in league on this issue, and we've been working together to lobby the NIH. Some major medical publishers such as Wiley and McGraw-Hill are lobbying independently to force more careful review of this extremely expensive and poorly conceived proposition.

What's your opinion on the pace of technological advancements in medical publishing, and does it keep pace with the rest of the industry?

I actually think … we're leading the industry. For example, laptops, PDAs and online decision support tools [databases of the latest medical information physicians can access]—this technology has been embraced within the medical community more so than any other industry. It would be hard to find a medical student or young physician who doesn't have a laptop or a PDA, and isn't accessing information wirelessly on the Internet. There is a critical need for medical students and practitioners to access medical information rapidly, whether for personal education or to treat a patient …