Congress Approves the NIH Public Access Plan
The House-Senate conference committee has approved the NIH public access plan. Here’s the official language, quoted in an ARL/SPARC press release:
The conferees are aware of the draft NIH policy on increasing public access to NIH-funded research. Under this policy, NIH would request investigators to voluntarily submit electronically the final, peer reviewed author’s copy of their scientific manuscripts; six months after the publisher’s date of publication, NIH would make this copy publicly available through PubMed Central. The policy is intended to help ensure the permanent preservation of NIH-funded research and make it more readily accessible to scientists, physicians, and the public.
The conferees note the comment period for the draft policy ended November 16th; NIH is directed to give full and fair consideration to all comments before publishing its final policy. The conferees request NIH to provide the estimated costs of implementing this policy each year in its annual Justification of Estimates to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. In addition, the conferees direct NIH to continue to work with the publishers of scientific journals to maintain the integrity of the peer review system."
Open Access News, Nov. 22, 2004 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
