Congress To NIH: Public Funds Should Equal Public Access

-- Library Journal, 07/26/2004

Another blow for open access? The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee has approved a provision in connection with the FY 2005 National Institutes of Health (NIH) appropriation that recommends free public access to research articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The report calls on NIH to offer access to authors' final manuscripts and supplemental materials via PubMed Central (PMC) six months after publication, unless the grantee used NIH funds to pay any publication charges, such as page charges, digital distribution fees. In that case, PMC access would be immediate. The report instructs NIH to inform the committee by December 1, 2004 how it intends to implement the policy. While publishers have consistently opposed such a mandate and are again expected to oppose this measure, Rick Johnson, director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), said the proposal was a "well-reasoned, incremental step that balances the interests of taxpayers and publishers."