JAMA’s new editor brings open access and other changes - STAT

"[Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo] recently spoke at the annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists, in St. Louis, where STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling sat down with her to learn more about the changes she’s implemented at the journal, including a new open access policy. Under this policy, most JAMA articles remain accessible only to subscribers, but authors can publicly post their research manuscripts the day they are published, and they are not charged open access fees as many journals do....

So what we decided as a journal was that authors, on the day we publish their work, can make their work available to any public repository and post it. So if you want to find the results of an article and you’re in a country or at an institution that doesn’t subscribe to our journals, you can still find that science because it’s available in a public repository. This decision is rooted in the principles of what’s good for science and it’s rooted in equity, frankly, because not all institutions, and not all people, have a subscription to JAMA.

This public access approach is also rooted in the principles of equity of who can publish. Open access has focused on mostly making sure there’s equity in what’s accessible to read, but that’s on the backs of sometimes very high fees that authors pay to publish in open access journals. What we’re saying is we believe in open access — and also believe in the value of what we do. We still think people will pay to subscribe to JAMA because there is value in the final version of record, the graphics editors making the figures, the podcasts, the corrections that get posted because things do change over time, that is what that subscription is buying you, all of those pieces.

But we can’t have open access fees put publishing out of reach for authors that might be early-career, or in disciplines or at institutions that aren’t as well-funded. We’re really pleased that the National Institutes of Health just announced and posted for public comment that this is the approach they are considering for all funded researchers in the NIH...."