[PubMed Central] is
at the heart of plans, backed by a coalition of US
politicians and advocacy groups, to make the
fruits of publicly funded research freely available.
On 13 June, a change was introduced to a
House of Representatives spending bill such that
NIH grantees would be required, not requested,
to submit to PubMed within 12 months of publication.
The proposal has upset some publishers
and scientific societies, who are wary of
citation confusion and a possible drop in income.
The move is in part a response to the limited
impact of NIH’s current policy on open access.
“It is not working in its current state,” says Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH deputy director for extramural
research and an advocate of full participation in
open-access publishing by all grantees.
A majority of the NIH Public Access Working
Group, an advisory body that includes publishers
and researchers, have
also endorsed mandatory
submission to PubMed
Central, says Thomas Detre,
a psychiatrist at the University
of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and chair of
the working group: “Nobody in academia will
do anything administrative that’s not obligatory.”...
[Publisher objections] could be
addressed when the Senate
drafts its appropriations bill,
as some senators are likely to want to include a
clause on mandatory submission. In May, for
example, Joseph Lieberman and John Cornyn
introduced a bill that would require that all federal
US agency grantees with annual research
budgets of more than $100 million make their
research papers freely available within six
months of publication (Nature 441, 140; 2006).
The Senate’s spending bill could be introduced
in July, although completion by the
autumn is more likely.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/21/2006 02:24:00 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.
