[Insight-developers] Happy New Year with NIH Open Access Mandate made Law

[Luis Ibanez]

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org./media/release07-1226.html

Alliance for Taxpayer Access
www.taxpayeraccess.org
December 26, 2007


                 PUBLIC ACCESS MANDATE MADE LAW

          President Bush signs omnibus appropriations bill,
   including National Institutes of Health research access provision


Washington, D.C. – December 26, 2007 – President Bush has signed into
law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which
includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
to provide the public with open online access to findings from its
funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated
public access to research funded by a major agency.

The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access
Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that
participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers
will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed
manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive,
PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available
and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after
publication in a journal.

"Facilitated access to new knowledge is key to the rapid advancement of
science," said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center and Nobel Prize Winner. "The tremendous benefits of broad,
unfettered access to information are already clear from the Human Genome
Project, which has made its DNA sequences immediately and freely
available to all via the Internet. Providing widespread access, even
with a one-year delay, to the full text of research articles supported
by funds from all institutes at the NIH will increase those benefits
dramatically."

"Public access to publicly funded research contributes directly to the
mission of higher education,” said David Shulenburger, Vice President
for Academic Affairs at NASULGC (the National Association of State
Universities and Land-Grant Colleges). “Improved access will enable
universities to maximize their own investment in research, and widen the
potential for discovery as the results are more readily available for
others to build upon.”

“Years of unrelenting commitment and dedication by patient groups and
our allies in the research community have at last borne fruit,” said
Sharon Terry, President and CEO of Genetic Alliance. “We’re proud of
Congress for their unrelenting commitment to ensuring the success of
public access to NIH-funded research. As patients, patient advocates,
and families, we look forward to having expanded access to the research
we need.”

“Congress has just unlocked the taxpayers’ $29 billion investment in
NIH,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding member of the
ATA). “This policy will directly improve the sharing of scientific
findings, the pace of medical advances, and the rate of return on
benefits to the taxpayer."

Joseph added, “On behalf of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, I’d like
to thank everyone who worked so hard over the past several years to
bring about implementation of this much-needed policy.”

For more information, and a timeline detailing the evolution of the NIH
Public Access Policy beginning May 2004, visit the ATA Web site at
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.


###


The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of patient, academic,
research, and publishing organizations that supports open public access
to the results of federally funded research. The Alliance was formed in
2004 to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded
research become fully accessible and available online at no extra cost
to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.


-- 
Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
http://www.arl.org/sparc
(202) 296-2296 ext 121
jennifer at arl.org