The Professional & Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and members of the DC Principles Coalition have previously commented to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and National Institute of Health (NIH) on the implementation of various policies affecting the publishers of scholarly and academic journals, including the Public Access Policy. The organisations have accepted as a general principle that NIH would, in its implementation of the Public Access Policy, abide by the Congressional requirement under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 to implement the policy.
In a letter addressed to the Director of NIH, the two organisations expressed their disappointment that an October 2010 notice from the NIH announces a number of applications involving images from journal articles deposited in PMC. These include the creation of NIH Images, a new NCBI database of images, and the enhancement of images and image searching on PubMed as well as on PMC. According to the organisations, the NIH has not negotiated with and obtained permission from the journal publishers who own the copyright in the respective articles, including images and other illustrations. Further, they state that such use is a derivative work and an unauthorised expansion and extension of the limited rights granted NIH, and as such would violate copyright law. A number of members were consulted and no publisher reported having been contacted by NIH for permission to create such derivative uses.
PSP members claim to be actively engaged in enriching the content that they publish, including by the use of images and extended image information including metadata to permit image searching. The NIH implementation directly impacts such projects and unfairly competes with academic and scholarly journal publishers, they have noted. Such concerns were precisely the reasons why the Congress provided a narrow grant of rights and noted the requirement to comply with copyright law, it has been observed.
PSP members are also actively engaged with providing permission processes that are easy to request and negotiate. Publishers are also happy to engage in meaningful discussion with NIH to understand what NIH's intentions are with respect to the images database, and consider the research needs and the competitive aspects.
The organisations have called on the HHS and NIH to reverse this policy. This is because it applies to article manuscripts submitted under the Public Access Policy and to any content submitted by a journal where the derivative use of the images is not expressly permitted in an agreement.
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