The BU SBRP Open Science Policy was recently featured in a post on the Science Commons Blog. In a post titled “A public commitment to Open Science,” Donna Wentworth describes the importance of having an institutional policy that supports Open Science:
“Good design choices are the key to powerful network effects. And when the goal is accelerating scientific research, there may be no more powerful design element than institutional policy. By making the right policy choices, people at institutions can help usher in new norms for knowledge sharing — where research results are systematically “plugged into” the network, multiplying the opportunities for discovery.
Boston University’s Superfund Basic Research Program (BU SBRP) has embarked on just such an endeavor. The program, which works to uncover the effects of improperly managed hazardous waste on reproductive health, has published its own open science policy.”
Wentworth’s post was then picked up by Open Access News blogger Peter Suber who raised a number of questions about our policy:
“I applaud what the SBRP is doing. But I have lots of questions. Is it putting all its peer-reviewed research articles on its wiki? (Some publishers who have no problem with depositing postprints in repositories do have problems with depositing postprints in wikis.) Either way, does it require this kind of OA archiving? Merely encourage it? Does it have an OAI-compliant OA repository in addition to its wiki? Are these questions (largely) moot because all its articles are published in OA journals? Does it require submission to OA journals? Encourage it? Does it pay processing fees at fee-based OA journals?”
To answer Suber’s questions, our current policy is to strongly encourage our researchers to submit to OA journals. With the development of the NIH Public Access Policy we have also developed a centralized method of submitting articles to PubMed Central for our researchers. While still under development, we hope to create an internal archive that will be OAI-compliant while also fulfilling the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy. We also pay the processing fees for our researchers to submit publications to fee based OA journals.
