Hi, I have just had a fraught conversation with a researcher who supports open access and what the OA policies in the UK are trying to acheive. But he is saying that we cannot under any circumstances make the metadata available for Nature, NEJM and Cell journals available prior to publication. He said he personally knows that people's papers have been pulled from Nature and NEJM for this reason. He said he became aware of the issue because the details of a recent paper of his that is not yet published turned up in Google Scholar when he was looking for something else (evidence that our are indexing is very good BTW, but that's a separate issue).
So this raises a few issues: 1. I think I need to get written confirmation from these journals about what their policy is relating to metadata being available prior to publication - does anyone have anything along these lines they can share? 2. There is a risk that if we start putting articles in these specific journals into a restricted collection and then only making the metadata available that other publishers/journals will change their policies to insist that they too should not have the metadata available earlier. 3. This raises our workflow complexity yet again - we have a standing number of articles that have been deposited but not yet published that sits at over 1200. We now simply check those articles that have been in the pile for more than three months*. So for those articles in the restricted collection there will be no exposure of them until we check that they have been published and move them into the open collecion (while the article is still under embargo). 4. Clearly there is a fair bit of bullying going on by the publishers towards the researchers - we need to get evidence and expose this. 5. Do not get me started on the 'one rule for this situation, and a different one for another' palaver that the publishers are putting us through. It gets worse by the minute. Danny *If anyone cracks an automated way of finding whether an accepted article has been published (given that hybrid joural articles are poorly indexed and that article titles can change etc) we would love to hear about it. -- Dr Danny Kingsley Head of Scholarly Communications Cambridge University Library West Road, Cambridge CB39DR P: +44 (0) 1223 747 437 M: +44 (0) 7711 500 564 E: [email protected] T: @dannykay68 ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3636-5939 _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
