Julianne Basinger, NIH Invites Comment on Proposal Requiring Free Online Access to Research It Supports, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "The National Institutes of Health released a draft proposal late Friday that would require researchers who receive NIH grants to provide the agency with electronic copies of final reports on their study results, which would be posted online in a federal digital archive that is free to all....Public comments on the proposal will be accepted until November 3....Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, said on Monday that the NIH proposal is 'not acceptable.' Most scientific journals already post articles on the Web, he said, and allow nonsubscribers to read them for a fee that can range from $5 to $30. Even so, he said, reposting the articles on PubMed Central 'is an unnecessary expenditure of federal funds for a Web site that is redundant.' But supporters of the proposal said the NIH had made a concession to publishers by allowing the six-month delay between a study's publication and its posting on PubMed Central. 'People who need it right away will have to be subscribers' to the scientific journals, said Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College who is directing an open-access drive for a group called Public Knowledge. [I also said more about this.] 'It would be more in the public interest to provide immediate open access.' Even so, he called the NIH proposal 'a very big step forward' in making study results available to a wide array of researchers, physicians, and patients who otherwise might not have access to the information because they cannot afford expensive subscriptions to scientific journals."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/07/2004 07:06:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
