As I reported last in April’s “Focus on Publishing” column, the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) policy on giving the public access to the research that it funds had a stormy beginning....The storm clouds are brewing again with two very different approaches to resolving the notion of how to insure access. The first is embedded rather deeply in the bowels of the bipartisan Cures Bill would seeks to expedite development of new therapies and cures for life-threatening diseases that was introduced on December 7th by Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS)....Section 499H-1 of the bill will require that...Department of Health and Human Services grantees shall provide the NLM “an electronic copy of the final version of all peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication for display on their digital library archive, PubMed Central, within 6 months from the date of publication.” Should grantees fail to comply with this 6 month requirement they could lose federal funding....In late October supporters of the Washington DC Principles Coalition, a group of not-for-profit publishers and societies that formed in 2004, openly offered the NIH an alternative proposal. Instead of further developing PubMed Central, they argue that a public-private partnership with NIH could use existing links from PubMed to individual journal web sites....This is the same proposal they made a year-and-half ago," observed [Heather] Joseph [Director of SPARC]. "It’s a good plan, but it doesn"t go the extra step we need it to go." That step, Joseph explained, is "access now and in perpetuity" for all publicly funded research....But the bottom line is that the NIH doesn’t need the Cures bill to change its policy-it could simply change its policy. In fact, this conversion to a firm six month requirement is what the NIH’s Public Access Working Group, established when the NIH policy was implemented, recommended at its November 15th meeting.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/04/2006 03:37:00 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.
