Hardin Scholarly Communication News

The National Institutes of Health has proposed a major change to its funding policy — it would mandate that all scientists who receive grants from the agency make the results of their research available to the public for free six months after publication. The policy change comes in response to a report by the House Appropriations Committee expressing concern that U.S. taxpayers are not reaping the benefits of research that they have paid for. The report urges NIH to devise a system whereby research results would be "freely and continuously available no later than six months after publication."

The proposal drew swift criticism from the scientific publishing industry, which argued that if people stop subscribing to their publications because they can read about these research results for free, the journals will be unable to perform the costly process of selecting, peer-reviewing and editing the results into the reliable products now available. However, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni says he’s concluded that publishers’ estimates of how much such a system would harm them or cost the government were "way out of line" with reality. Although about 60,000 articles are published each year reporting on NIH-funded research, they constitute only a third of all biomedical journal articles. "Do you really think people are not going to subscribe to a journal because they can read 30% of the articles in it for free?" asks Richard Roberts, a research director at New England Biolabs, who strongly supports the shift to open access. ( Washington Post 6 Sep 2004) <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64389-2004Sep5.html>

Read the full proposal at: http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html