[sc-announce] NIH Open Access mandate made permanent - Science Commons blog

Kaitlin Thaney kaitlin at creativecommons.org
Tue Mar 17 15:29:03 EDT 2009


*NIH Open Access mandate made permanent*

March 17th, 2009<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2009/03/17/nih-mandate-made-permanent/>by
Thinh

The NIH Public Access Policy, which was due to expire this year, has now
been made permanent by the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations
Act<http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/Release09-0312.html>,
signed into law last week.

Last year, Science Commons, SPARC, and ARL jointly released a White
Paper<http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/nih_copyright_v1.pdf>authored
by our board member Mike Carroll called “Complying
With the National Institutes of Health Public Access
Policy,”<http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/nih_copyright_v1.pdf>explaining
the new NIH-mandated PubMed deposit requirement and questions
that grant recipients should consider in designing a program to comply with
it. At that time, the new mandatory policy had just taken effect, and many
recipients were still learning how to comply. Nevertheless, the results were
dramatic. Prior to NIH’s mandatory deposit requirement, under a voluntary
policy NIH began in 2005, the compliance rate in terms of deposits in PubMed
had been very low (4%, as published in an NIH report to Congress in 2006).
Shortly after the adoption of the new mandatory policy, submissions spiked
to an all time high<http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6581624.html#news1>,
prompting an NIH official to project compliance rates of 55-60%. Just take a
look at this NIH chart <http://www.nihms.nih.gov/stats/index.shtml>, and
note the sharp rise after the policy took effect in early 2008.

In a subsequent White
Paper<http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/opendoors_v1.pdf>that
Science Commons and SPARC jointly issued, our
recommendations<http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/opendoors_v1.pdf>included
looking beyond compliance with the new policy and taking this
opportunity to develop comprehensive institutional deposit and public access
policies, such as Harvard’s open access
policy<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Esecfas/February_2008_Agenda.pdf>
.

Making the NIH Public Access Policy permanent will provide scholars and
institutions with much needed certainty and impetus to focus on implementing
these requirements within their institutions. It also creates a opportunity
for scholars, universities, and the research community to take a broader
look at their institution's scholarly publishing and open access policies,
not only as it applies to deposit in PubMed, but also as it applies to their
own institutional repositories and scholarly communities.

We will work with our collaborators to develop further policy and legal
briefings for university and public research institutions who are studying
these issues. Look for that this summer.
-- 
http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2009/03/17/nih-mandate-made-permanent/

--------------------------------------
Kaitlin Thaney
Program Manager
Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org
kaitlin at creativecommons.org
--------------------------------------
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