Yesterday when I posted the good news that the House Appropriations Committee had approved an OA mandate for the NIH, I didn’t have the exact language of the bill. Now I do:
Sec. 217: The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
The new appropriations bill is scheduled to come up for a vote by the full House next Tuesday, July 17, and publishers are sure to lobby hard to delete this language. If you are a US citizen and support public access for publicly-funded research, it’s critically important to contact your representative and ask him/her to support this bill or at least to oppose any efforts to amend or strike the language on the OA mandate for the NIH. Contact your rep now, before you forget, and spread the word.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/13/2007 11:51:00 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.
