RE Homer Simpson at NIH

["Martin Frank" <MFrank@The-APS.org>]

Chuck,

In December 2004, Dr. Zerhouni published an article titled NIH 
Public Access Policy in Science (vol 306: 1895, December 10, 
2004)

[http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/306/5703/1895.pdf].

In the article Zerhouni writes "NIH support is involved in 
approximately 65,000 articles per year. Using 2003 data, NLM 
estimates that publications resulting annually from NIH-funded 
research represent about 10% of the articles in the nearly 5000 
journals indexed by PubMed. NIH funded articles account for more 
than half of the total published articles for only 1% of these 
journals. It is unlikely that scientists and libraries would use 
the proposed public access policy to gain access to the 
scientific literature in lieu of their journal subscriptions, 
because if they did, they would be able to access only a fraction 
of a journal's content."

His statement that only 1% of the journals have more than half 
their articles funded by NIH suggests that it is okay to 
sacrifice approximately 50 journals for the greater good of 
public access. However, when one examines the list of journals 
included in that 1%, one discovers that the majority are society 
journals.  If you rank order the top 50 journals based on % NIH 
content, one discovers that 33 out of 49 are society journals.

If you go to Science, you can download supplemental data files 
that list all the journals in the 5000 cohort mentioned by Dr. 
Zerhouni.  It is an alpha list in an excel format that can be 
sorted.

Martin Frank, Ph.D.
Executive Director, American Physiological Society
E-mail: mfrank@the-aps.org
APS Home Page: www.the-aps.org