The Council of the National Academy of Sciences endorses the proposed National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy that research supported by NIH will be made freely available online at PubMed Central (PMC) not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The benefits of this policy to science worldwide and to the general public seem to us to be significant.
This policy is a reasonable approach for sustaining subscription revenue, and a number of leading journals already follow it, including the flagship journal of the Academy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). [...]
We wish to emphasize the importance of having publishers provide to PMC the final, published copy of each paper, rather than leaving the author's originally accepted manuscript in PMC....Providing the redacted paper will be effortless for journals that already release papers to PMC within six months of publication, and we hope that publishers who make papers free after a longer period -- or not at all -- will reconsider their policies. [...]
We reaffirm our conviction that the interests of science --- both in biomedicine and other areas --- are best served by ensuring that ideas and information are exchanged as freely and rapidly as possible. We look forward to participating in the continuing evolution of scientific publishing, and we applaud the NIH for taking this important step.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/16/2004 08:15:00 PM.
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.
