This notice is to announce and to seek public comments regarding NIH’s plans to facilitate enhanced public access to NIH health related research information. NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding. This would include all research grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, as well as National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowships. We define final manuscript as the author’s version resulting after all modifications due to the peer review process. Submission of the final manuscript will provide NIH supported investigators with an alternate means by which they will meet and fulfill the requirement of the provision of one copy of each publication in the annual or final progress reports. Submission of the electronic versions of final manuscripts will be monitored as part of the annual grant progress review and close-out process.
NIH considers final manuscripts to be an important record of the research funded by the government and will archive these manuscripts and any appropriate supplementary information in PubMed Central (PMC), NIH’s digital repository for biomedical research. Six months after an NIH supported research study’s publication—or sooner if the publisher agrees—the manuscript will be made available freely to the public through PMC. If the publisher requests, the author’s final version of the publication will be replaced in the PMC archive by the final publisher’s copy with an appropriate link to the publisher’s electronic database.
Comments may be submitted by email or web form, and are due November 2. (PS: It's very important that US citizens who support OA send comments. You can be sure that opponents of OA will send comments.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/04/2004 04:15:00 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.
