[GOAL] Instistence by researchers that we do not make metadata available prior to publication for Nature, NEJM and Cell journals

[Danny Kingsley]

Hi,

I have just had a fraught conversation with a researcher who supports 
open access and what the OA policies in the UK are trying to acheive. 
But he is saying that we cannot under any circumstances make the 
metadata available for Nature, NEJM and Cell journals available prior to 
publication. He said he personally knows that people's papers have been 
pulled from Nature and NEJM for this reason. He said he became aware of 
the issue because the details of a recent paper of his that is not yet 
published turned up in Google Scholar when he was looking for something 
else (evidence that our are indexing is very good BTW, but that's a 
separate issue).

So this raises a few issues:

1. I think I need to get written confirmation from these journals about 
what their policy is relating to metadata being available prior to 
publication - does anyone have anything along these lines they can share?

2. There is a risk that if we start putting articles in these specific 
journals into a restricted collection and then only making the metadata 
available that other publishers/journals will change their policies to 
insist that they too should not have the metadata available earlier.

3. This raises our workflow complexity yet again - we have a standing 
number of articles that have been deposited but not yet published that 
sits at over 1200. We now simply check those articles that have been in 
the pile for more than three months*. So for those articles in the 
restricted collection there will be no exposure of them until we check 
that they have been published and move them into the open collecion 
(while the article is still under embargo).

4. Clearly there is a fair bit of bullying going on by the publishers 
towards the researchers - we need to get evidence and expose this.

5. Do not get me started on the 'one rule for this situation, and a 
different one for another' palaver that the publishers are putting us 
through. It gets worse by the minute.

Danny

*If anyone cracks an automated way of finding whether an accepted 
article has been published (given that hybrid joural articles are poorly 
indexed and that article titles can change etc) we would love to hear 
about it.

-- 
Dr Danny Kingsley
Head of Scholarly Communications
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB39DR
P: +44 (0) 1223 747 437
M: +44 (0) 7711 500 564
E: dak45 at cam.ac.uk
T: @dannykay68
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3636-5939