More on the NIH policy and CURES Act
The Winter 2006 issue of ARL’s Federal Relations and Information Policy is now online. Section V.B is on the NIH public-access policy and V.C is on the CURES Act. Excerpt:
Based on a review of statistics detailing grantee deposit rates, the NIH Public Access Working Group, comprised of key stakeholders including members of the library community, recommended that researchers be required to deposit articles in PMC in lieu of the current policy which is voluntary. Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries, MIT, is a member of the Working Group. The library community strongly supports this recommendation. ARL will continue to monitor the NIH policy and work with others in the community, SPARC and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) in particular, on this evolving policy….Introduced on December 14, 2005, by Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS), the bipartisan “American Center for Cures Act of 2005” would expedite the development of new therapies and cures for life-threatening diseases. One provision in the bill calls for free public access to articles stemming from research funded by agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), including NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Under the proposed legislation, articles published in a peer-reviewed journal would be required to be made publicly available within 6 months via NIH’s PubMed Central online digital archive. The library associations note that although some final electronic manuscripts are made available on PubMed Central, many are not—and delays in posting research on PubMed sometimes thwart public access to important articles for up to a year. The library announcement is available at www.librarycopyrightalliance.org. ARL will promote the public access provision in the CURES legislation.
