If a publisher does not like the NIH policy …

Matt Cockerill, der Geschäftsführer von BiomedCentral, weist die Verleger im BioMed Central Blog auf eine interessante Möglichkeit hin, das NIH-Open Access Mandate zu umgehen (Thanks Peter Suber): 😉

The first point to make, in response, is to note the matter of timing. A potential author signs an agreement with NIH concerning the conditions of their grant funding long before any manuscript resulting from that funding is submitted to a publisher. If a publisher does not like the NIH policy, they are within their rights to choose not to consider submissions from NIH-funded authors. But a publisher cannot reasonably claim that NIH is appropriating its intellectual property, since the author’s pre-existing contractual agreement, at the point of manuscript submission, is entirely with NIH, not with the publisher. The publisher has no claim whatsoever over the research at that point. [Fettdruck durch mich]