Open Access und NIH

[Dale Askey <dale.askey@xxxxxxxx>]

Falls noch nicht bekannt:

To: All ACRL Members and Other Interested Parties

There has been a very important development in Washington related to open
access.

Yesterday the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee approved
report language recommending that the National Institutes of Health provide
free public access to research articles resulting from NIH-funded research.
The Committee Report accompanying the FY 2005 Labor, HHS, Education and
Related Agencies Appropriations Bill recommends that NIH offer access to
authors' final manuscripts (as accepted for journal publication) and
supplemental materials through PubMed Central six months after publication.
If the grantee used NIH funds to pay any publication charges (e.g., page or
color charges, or fees for digital distribution), PMC access would be
immediate. The Report instructs NIH to inform the Committee by December 1,
2004 how it intends to implement the policy.

This proposal is supports the fundamental principle that the public should
have open access to taxpayer-funded research.   The Report language    had
bipartisan support in the House Appropriations Committee.  The language
could, however, be changed in a final conference version with the Senate.

ACRL, through the Open Access Working Group (an alliance of several library
associations and other groups that favor open access), will be working to
gain endorsement of the proposal in the Senate.   Please stay tuned for
further information on what you can do to support this encouraging
development.

Ray English, Chair
ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee

__________

Dale Askey
Librarian for Germanic Languages and Literatures
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
120 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Vox: (203) 432-1757
Fx: (203) 432-8527