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NIH Open Access Policy for Grant Recipients Begins Today
Tucked away in the omnibus Labor-HHS-Education appropriations package signed into law at the very end of last year was a provision requiring that any published articles emerging from research supported by the National Institutes of Health must be deposited in the PubMed Central database, where they will be available through open access, within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Beginning today, these rules apply to all work funded by the NIH. Some news from around the web:
Peter Suber has a brief history of the movement for OA policy at the NIH at Open Access News. He hails it as a milestone: “implementation day for the world’s first mandatory OA policy demanded by the national legislature, at the world’s largest funder of scientific research.”
Harold Varmus, Co-Founder of the Public Library of Science and the former Director of the NIH, explained some of the benefits of the move for biomedical research publishing in an editorial at PLoS Biology:
Since NIH-supported investigators publish about 80,000 papers each year, many of them in journals that currently do not contribute their articles to PMC, the library will soon grow at about twice its already impressive rate. With an enlarged PMC, the virtues of full-text searches and ready access will be more obvious, encouraging still greater participation by authors of work not funded by the agencies that mandate deposition. As we all know, scientists want their work to be found, read, and cited.
Andrea Gawrylewski at The Scientist News Blog covers the controversy the policy has ignited in some corners of the scientific publishing community.
Gavin Baker explained the details of that argument and the public benefits of open access for scientific research in his January Science Progress column, “Public Science.” Full information is available at the NIH.
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