Linda Watson, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information: Implications for Open Access, Charleston Advisor, January 2005. Excerpt: 'While many publishers claimed that this proposal was hastily conceived, in fact, there is significant context for the principles behind it. First, is the NIH mission itself, which is “to uncover new knowledge that will lead to better health for everyone.” Second, Congress is very interested in protecting its investment in biomedical research, ensuring value to the American taxpayer, particularly as the NIH budget doubled over the past five years. Institutional researchers (and the journals who publish their work) have benefited significantly from this investment....One can also point to the example of GenBank in which researchers have openly shared information to the benefit of all for years, or to the scientific advances that were accelerated by the open sharing that characterized the Human Genome Project, and which permitted the rapid identification of the SARS virus. There is also context related to journals. In 1997, the National Library of Medicine transitioned access to MEDLINE from fee to free. This was highly praised in Congress as a significant step to making the results of research freely available to the American public and the world, although just the abstracts, not the full text. And in fact, the usage of MEDLINE, now integrated into PubMed, has skyrocketed over the intervening seven years to an estimated 677 million searches annually.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/13/2005 10:56:00 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.
