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.
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 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.
The continued silence from major funders involved in the eLife-PubMed Central scandal is creating a noise all its own.
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.
Attacks — both overt and covert — from OA advocates and NIH/NLM phantoms come in the wake of the posts revealing how eLife and PubMed Central coordinated activities and kept secrets.
More information emerges about PubMed Central, its processes, its relationship with eLife, and its role as a technology provider. Overall, it looks like certain OA friends get special treatment, and the processes you think occur are often short-circuited and may not even be tracked.