Jocelyn Kaiser, NIH Proposes Public Access to Papers, Science Magazine, September 7, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking to calm the fray over whether scientific results should be freely available. On Friday, it released a draft policy aimed at improving public access to the results of NIH-funded research....In July, a congressional spending panel recommended that NIH post NIH-funded manuscripts within 6 months of publication, or immediately if NIH grant funds were used to pay publication costs. The suggestion...triggered frenzied lobbying on all sides. Librarians, patient organizations, and scientists who think taxpayers should have easier access to NIH-funded research urged NIH to follow the House language. Commercial publishers and many scientific societies lobbied against a mandatory plan, saying it could bankrupt journals. After holding meetings with interested groups, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni told scientists last week that 6 months was 'reasonable'....'We're strongly behind it,' says Richard Johnson of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Scientific societies had a mixed reaction. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, calls the plan 'an unnecessary expenditure of federal funds for a redundant repository of peer-reviewed literature.' "
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/08/2004 10:22:00 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.
