Geoff Brumfiel, Biomedical agency floats open-access plan, News@Nature, September 8, 2004 (free registration required). Excerpt: "Comments are invited within 60 days on the [NIH] plan, which broadly complies with some advisory language that was added to the NIH's budget bill by a congressional committee in July. The NIH is expected to decide on the version to be implemented shortly after that....'We are aware of many of the implications of possible changes,' NIH director Elias Zerhouni told a meeting of representatives of scientific societies and patient advocacy groups at the agency's main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, on 31 August. 'At the same time, the mission of the NIH includes delivering research information to the public.'...But some publishers oppose the plan, complaining that they have not been sufficiently consulted on its impact on the established scientific communication system [PS reply]....'Zerhouni is making us all do this experiment,' [PS reply] says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, Maryland. 'The federal government is trying to regulate the dissemination of information [PS reply] at the expense of an established, diverse publishing operation.' [PS reply] Advocates of open access strongly support the proposed policy change. 'I applaud what he's doing,' says Harold Varmus, former director of the NIH and president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. 'To hide NIH research behind high subscription fees is not fair,' he says."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/08/2004 02:23:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
