Open access to publicly funded research signed into law: “Congress has just unlocked the taxpayers’ $29 billion investment in NIH”*
On December 26th 2007, President Bush signed the omnibus spending bill (the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764)) requiring the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to mandate open access for NIH-funded research, allowing us all to read the research paid for by our tax dollars.
As stated by the press release of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, “This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.” The creation of this law has been lauded by scientists, researchers, librarians, and other supporters of open access to government-sponsored information.
Because this is a huge bill (click here for the 613-page GPO version)– this is the important language (from section 218 on page 344):
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
Peter Suber of the Open Access blog has put together some great links to other commenters on this legislation (hat tip for many links in this post). P.S. And a happy belated public domain day, which is every January 1st!
P.S. And a happy public domain day, which is every January 1st!*quote from Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) in press release of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access
