Open Access to NIH funded research
Should publically funded research be freely available to the public? The House Appropriations Committee has directed the National Institutes of Health to develop a policy of requiring that a complete electronic text of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be supplied to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central.
Twenty-file Nobel Prize winners have signed an open letter to Congress praising the plan.
(U.S. Newswire : Releases : “An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress…”)
Pat Schroeder, head of the Association of American Publishers, doesn’t like the plan, though. She says that, it “would threaten the continued survival of many scientific, scholarly and medical publications and professional societies.”
(Scientists want research papers freely available
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY 8/29/2004)
ALA and ACRL, along with AALL, ARL, MLA and SLA, have joined with a number of other organizations in a new coalition of taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions to support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.
(Libraries join new coalition to support public access to research, Sept. 2, 2004.)