Revisiting Kent Anderson’s post based on his FOIA request documents show that PubMed Central spends most of its money tagging author manuscripts, and that its stricter rules for NIH authors may double its costs.
As requested, here is a summary of all the things found so far through the FOIA requests regarding PubMed Central — from eLife to BMC to JMLA to conflicts of interest to coverups. It’s quite a fetch.
The PMC NAC, facing controversies about its oversight functions and seeing the focus of its oversight embroiled in a public scandal, said nothing about these topics at its latest meeting.
Using free government infrastructure that’s not available to everyone else raises questions of fairness, which lead to questions of harm. But who is harmed may be both obvious and subtle.
New documents show that the Director of the NCBI was deeply involved in getting eLife launched on PubMed Central, that NLM staff were uneasy about the shortcuts taken to make it happen, and that eLife was largely driving the bus throughout.
New documents obtained via an ongoing FOIA request show that PubMed Central spends most of its money tagging author manuscripts, and that its stricter rules for NIH authors may double its costs.
More indications of favoritism and cronyism, this time stretching back from F1000 Research to BioMed Central, and more mismanaged conflicts of interests. The common thread may be a new “old boys” network.
A proposed partnership between publishers and the US government in response to the OSTP memorandum may show the way forward for public-private networked information solutions.
An interview with Susan King of the CHORUS steering group about the publisher response to the OSTP public access memorandum.
More internal PubMed Central emails show quite clearly that PMC is wasting taxpayers’ money solving problems publishers have already solved.
PubMed Central reduces article downloads from 14 biomedical society websites when articles are made freely available after embargo.
The National Library of Medicine has a couple of powerful brands, but they’ve become conflated and compromised by poor brand management. Ultimately, their brand value is derived from the value of the MEDLINE brand, which may now be spread too thin.
Conflicts of interest at PubMed Central have been mismanaged, and seem to have led to loading the National Advisory Committee with Wellcome representatives, among other things.
Circumstantial evidence has become direct evidence — that eLife requested publication in PMC; that PMC collaborated with eLife; that PMC sought to conceal its preferential treatment; and that systems and processes at the NLM regarding PMC inclusion are unclear and open to abuse and misuse.
A new way to view journal content in PubMed Central casts journal branding aside for a uniform PMC approach.