Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

One small step for open access…

April 13th, 2008 by dwentworth

NPR's Science Friday program has now posted its interview with Harold Varmus on the landmark NIH open access mandate, which went into effect this past Monday. Varmus, the former NIH director who co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS), talks about what the mandate means for the future of biomedical research, fielding questions about everything from freeing dark data to expanding access to orphan disease research to reclaiming our scientific heritage in the literature.

Among the many other excellent points he makes, Varmus argues that more research funders should adopt open access policies — not only to magnify the impact of the research they fund, but also to open it to innovative uses:

You can imagine that if you were a funder of science anywhere in the world, you would want the results that you paid for to be out there for everyone — not just to see, but to work with. Indeed, the way in which one works with the information is extraordinarily important in this day in which we use the computer to mine research data for new ways to think about things.

Amen.

In case you missed it earlier this week, here's Varmus's PLoS editorial on the mandate: Progress Toward Public Access to Science. For more information about the NIH mandate going forward, including university-sponsored resources for authors, check out SPARC's NIH implementation page.

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Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth AT creativecommons.org
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