NHMRC and ARC at Odds Regarding Open Access Publishing. (February 24, 2012)

This past Tuesday, the CEO of the National Health and Medical Research Council, Warwick Anderson, wrote an opinion piece for The Conversation in which he announced:

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has joined other international health research funding bodies, both governmental (such as NIH) and philanthropic (such as the Wellcome Trust), in requiring that publications from research funded by us are placed in the public domain – so called “open access”. This also assists other researchers in planning and conducting their research. Open access is particularly important for researchers in low income countries... From July this year, we will be mandating the deposit of publication outputs arising from NHMRC funded research into an institutional repository within 12 months of publication.

     NHMRC is a signatory to the Joint Statement on Data Sharing of Public Health Research, demonstrating our commitment to the timely and responsible sharing of public health data.

Today Jill Rowbotham reporting in The Australian quotes the Australian Research Council's Chief Executive, Margaret Sheil: "We encourage it [open access publishing] as appropriate.," and went on to explain:

In the NHMRC's case, by and large, what the public is seeking access to is information regarding health and that's quite appropriate.

In many areas of our research there is no community interest in the outcomes until much further down the track. In the humanities and many other areas it can be difficult to get published.

And what do you do about research for which the main form of publication is books? It's not that hard for a scientist to get papers into some sort of repository that's open access.

And added that ARC researchers had to account for themselves: "they have to explain to us why they haven't done it. We have provided a limit of two per cent of the grants to be used for publishing purposes.''

One gets the impression that Professor Sheil is overdoing her excuses.