A coalition of national library associations, representing more than 80,000 information specialists, praised the introduction last week of legislation to establish the American Center for Cures within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The bill includes a provision that would help to make taxpayer-funded biomedical research available to all potential users – an important goal for the library groups....Among the requirements of the bill is the establishment of free public access to articles stemming from research funded by agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), including NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Under the proposed legislation, articles published in a peer-reviewed journal would be required to be made publicly available within months via NIH's popular PubMed Central online digital archive. The groups note that although some final electronic manuscripts are made available now on PubMed, many are not—and delays in posting research on PubMed sometimes stall public access to important articles for up to a year. "Depriving researchers and members of the public of the findings of research funded by taxpayers is not only wrong, it can also slow down the discovery of new and improved treatment for diseases," said Miriam Nisbet, a spokesperson for the library coalition.
The coalition members are American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Medical Library Association (MLA), and the Special Libraries Association (SLA).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/21/2005 08:45:00 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.
