NIEHS is considering privatizing the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) (http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS1466 — http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/allpubs.html). It is a monthly open-access journal published by the NIEHS and is read in nearly every country of the world. It covers environmental news, environmental medicine, and children’s environmental health. It is available on the web and made available to Pubmed Central, Medscape, and JSTOR. Its highly successful monthly Student Edition “sponsors development of teacher lesson plans based on environmental news articles.” It is ranked second of 132 environmental sciences journals and fifth of 90 public, environmental, and occupational health journals.
The announcement says that, NIEHS has not reached a final decision about potential privatization of EHP. Nor has an implementation plan for carrying out such a decision been developed. Implementation, if executed, would address several core issues, which are listed below with questions for which public input is sought in developing agency strategy. It poses several questions including: How should EHP’s current open access policy and commitments to provide content to public archives be addressed in a potential privatization? and Overall, how would a privatization of EHP be an advantage or disadvantage to the NIEHS and to environmental health science?
Excerpts from
- Request for Information Relating to Environmental Health Perspectives 06 Sept 2005, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
ACTION: Request for information relating to potential privatization of Environmental Health Perspectives, a leading biomedical publication in the field of environmental health science, currently published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), NIH, DHHS.
SUMMARY: For several decades, NIEHS has published Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) to provide a forum for research in environmental health science. EHP has well fulfilled this purpose, but NIEHS is now considering new channels to inform scientists, clinicians, patients, families, and the general public about environmental health research findings. NIEHS is exploring web-based and other methods to disseminate such information and anticipates development of a new system to communicate important recent findings in a timely and efficient manner.
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I strongly encourage the docs community to post comments to the NIEHS. You can do it online at their RFI page. THe deadline for comments is October 28 so do it now!!