Governmental Backing for Open Access

Yesterday, the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives recommended that the National Institutes of Health provide the public with free, online access to articles resulting from research it has financed. The recommendation is included in a report that accompanies a spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services for the 2005 fiscal year. The report says that within six months after an article is published, the NIH should make available researchers' final manuscripts via PubMed Central, a popular digital archive maintained by the National Library of Medicine.

In a report released today, the Science and Technology Committee of Britain's House of Commons similarly endorses open access to research results and criticized the scientific-publishing industry for the escalating prices of its journals. In the report, which deals with the budgetary face-off between academic libraries and publishers over journal-subscription prices, the British committee stopped short of requiring open access to research papers. But it encourages two ways of making articles freely available: depositing published papers into online archives and publishing scientific journals using author-pays business models, in which authors pay to publish and subscription fees are eliminated.

(Via the Chronicle 7/19/04 and 7/20/04)

Posted by Tom on July 20, 2004