A little-noticed provision in a bill passed last week by the House Appropriations Committee would require federally sponsored researchers to make their findings more widely available to the public.
The provision appears in an appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education for the 2007 fiscal year, which begins on October 1. It would require all researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health to submit electronic versions of papers reporting their findings to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's online system, and they would have to do so within one year of publication in a scholarly journal.
Advocates of making research findings available free online say the public should have access to taxpayer-financed research without having to pay subscription fees to academic journals. Publishers have worried that making more of the information available free would gut the moneymaking capabilities of their journals -- a critical concern for some academic associations that rely on their journals for revenue....
"This is a pretty big move," said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which has fought for open access to federally backed research. Still, she said, the one-year timeline is too long. Immediate access to research findings would be best, but making information available to the public within six months of publication would be a better compromise, Ms. Joseph said.
Publishers were wary of the legislation and said it would hurt the academic journals that typically publish such research. Barbara Meredith, vice president for the professional and scholarly publishing division of the Association of American Publishers, said the provision would upset the balance created by the current voluntary system. Requiring scientists to make their work available one year after publication in a journal "disregards the complexity of scholarly publishing," she said. It is premature to change the current system after just one year with little data to support the move, she said. The bill now faces a vote by the entire House of Representatives, and Ms. Meredith said the publishers' group would try to get the provision removed on the House floor....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/19/2006 10:47:00 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.
