Barbara Quint, Future of the NIH Open Access Policy, Information Today, October 11, 2004. Excerpt: "Hallelujah! The day of liberation has come! And only the first of many more, I would predict....Basically, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), funder of at least a quarter of the world's best medical research, will mandate that all grantees and contractors submit electronic copies of finished manuscripts for full-text release through PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's popular medical research site. Comments may be e-mailed to publicaccess@nih.gov through Nov. 2 [PS: recently extended to Nov. 16]....The House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations helped bring this about by pushing and prodding the NIH, but (and this is important) no statutory language was needed. It only took a change in NIH procedures and the boilerplate language in its grants. So if other federal research and development funding agencies wanted to follow suit, they too might not need legislative action to make it happen....This is a tremendous breakthrough. If Congress stays interested, it could accelerate the momentum of the open access movement exponentially. Already heads of other federal information agencies are queuing up for their chance to press for open access....We've long wearied of hearing obscenely rich STM commercial publishers crying "wolf" if their annual profit increases ever dropped within waving distance of single digits. No one listens anymore. However, this time long tails and hot yellow eyes may actually have come into view. If publishers are waiting for the community of librarians to pick up pitchforks and come to their rescue, they'd do better to find some trees to climb....As information professionals, we may look back on this NIH policy change as the moment in time when open access began its final victory."
The same issue of Information Today has an article on the NIH plan by Robin Peek, The Politics of Publishing, but it's not OA.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/11/2004 04:35:00 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.
