The battle for free public access to government-funded research may heat up after Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) introduced legislation to establish the American Center for Cures within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Included in that bill, known as the CURES act, is an aggressive provision to help make taxpayer-funded biomedical research available to all potential users. Although Congress directed the NIH to draft a policy to achieve that goal in 2005, what resulted was a weak policy that simply requested NIH-funded research be deposited into PubMed Central within a year after publication. A provision of the CURES Act, however, if passed, would require research funded by a number of government agencies be made available within six months. In addition, the law would set penalties for non-compliance. SPARC director Heather Joseph said that library groups were "gratified" to see that Congress took universal access to research into account.
Comment. Two quick notes: (1) Why is it "aggressive" to give taxpayers access to the research for which they've alrady paid? The six-month embargo is a compromise with the public-interest that makes the policy even less aggressive. (2) Congress directed the NIH to adopt an OA mandate in mid-2004. See my procedural history of the NIH policy.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/11/2006 10:19:00 AM.
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.
