Compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy involves three distinct elements:
First, authors must retain sufficient rights in their articles, even when (or if) they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers, to give NIH a license to make their work available in a publicly accessible database.
Second, either the author or some entity acting on the author’s behalf must actually submit the article to PubMed Central. The principal author usually will need to verify that the final version of the article as “marked up” by PMC for digital release is correct.
Finally, the author(s) will need to obtain PMC reference numbers for their articles to include in subsequent documents submitted to NIH, as described above.
Retention of sufficient rights in an article to allow PMC deposit is probably the most unfamiliar and challenging of these necessary parts of compliance. This analysis will focus, therefore, on this first element of compliance, and will outline three broad options....
The first broad option that could ensure the needed copyright management is for authors to publish their articles in journals that offer to deposit those articles in PubMed Central for the author....
The second broad option for managing copyright to permit implementation of the public access requirement is for the institution itself to take from its faculty authors a non-exclusive license in any work that arises out of funded research that would give the institution the right to authorize deposit....
Finally, the last broad option for copyright management is for the institution to provide comprehensive assistance to authors as they negotiate retention of the right to deposit their work in PMC (as well as in other digital repositories)....
The following sample letter illustrates an approach that would notify publishers that an article that is being submitted for consideration is based on NIH-funded research and therefore must be made accessible to the public under the NIH’s new policy....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/31/2008 03:33:00 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.
