Maggie Fox, NIH Asks for Internet Access to Studies, Reuters, February 3, 2005. Excerpt: 'The U.S. National Institutes of Health, which spent nearly $20 billion last year funding research, urged scientists on Thursday to let the agency publish their studies on the Internet. Researchers receiving NIH grants should send their manuscripts to a free, Web-based archive managed by the National Library of Medicine as soon as they can, after first submitting them to medical or scientific journals, NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni said. "With the rapid growth in the public's use of the Internet, NIH must take a leadership role in making available to the public the research that we support," Zerhouni said. "Scientists have a right to see the results of their work disseminated as quickly and broadly as possible, and NIH is committed to helping our scientists exercise this right." The policy is a challenge to scientific journals that usually publish such research....Scientists can ask for a delay of up to one year to protect the profitability of journals, Zerhouni said. "My goal is to change the landscape of scientific publishing, which is paid for by the public," he told reporters in a telephone briefing....Disease advocates have complained especially loudly, saying they cannot find information they need without paying fees for an online peek at a study.' (PS: The criteria cited by the NIH support mandated OA and a shorter embargo period better than they support the actual policy announced today.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/03/2005 05:29:00 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.
