Congress Pushes Plan to Make Papers Free
NIH may have to insist on submission to online archive.
Nature 441, 915(22 June 2006) | doi:10.1038/441915a; Published online 21 June 2006
By Gene Russo
Abstract:
A question to holders of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH): do you plan to submit publications resulting from NIH-funded research to PubMed Central? The answer is probably ‘no’. Fewer than 4% of NIH-funded researchers send their papers to the free-to-access archive, despite the agency having requested that they do so since May 2005.
That could be about to change. The archive is at the heart of plans, backed by a coalition of US politicians and advocacy groups, to make the fruits of publicly funded research freely available. On 13 June, a change was introduced to a House of Representatives spending bill such that NIH grantees would be required, not requested, to submit to PubMed within 12 months of publication. The proposal has upset some publishers and scientific societies, who are wary of citation confusion and a possible drop in income.
The move is in part a response to the limited impact of NIH’s current policy on open access. “It is not working in its current state,” says Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH deputy director for extramural research and an advocate of full participation in open-access publishing by all grantees.
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