Taxpayer Access

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is organizing a grassroots campaign to inform Congress about the importance of open access to medical research. I've boiled down their Taxpayer Access : Open Access to Taxpayer-Funded Research information web page.

The U.S. Congress has, in the last several years, doubled the budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), giving it the second largest share of federal research funding behind defense research to advance biological and medical knowledge. While the public pays for this research, there has been too little use of the Internet's capability to bring down access barriers and put informative, carefully screened research reports in the hands of more patients and patient groups, physicians, public health professionals, students, teachers, and scientists.

Congress is now looking at the issue of access, considering a proposal that makes NIH research available online, within six months of publication, for no extra charge to the American public. A House Appropriations Committee report recommends beginning in 2005 that NIH "develop a policy ... requiring that a complete electronic copy of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be provided to PMC (PubMed Central) upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication" in a recognized scientific journal. Under this proposal, NIH-funded scientists would deposit their article manuscripts, as accepted for journal publication, into a publicly-accessible archive on the web at PubMed Central.

Posted by Tom on July 23, 2004