Towards Open Access

Excerpt

The National Institutes of Health has issued a new policy for open access to all NIH-funded research, whereby NIH grantees are strongly encouraged to deposit their complete manuscripts and supplementary material to an Internet repository, thereby enabling the rapid dissemination of research results and the long-term archiving of scientific literature [1, 2]. Entitled "Policy on enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from NIH-funded research," the Public Access Policy is a major step towards the fulfillment of a universal right to access scientific information without barriers and free of charge (i.e., Open Access). The new policy derives historically from a request made by the US House Committee on Appropriations to the National Library of Medicine in 2004 to identify potential remedies to "ensure that taxpayer-funded research remains in the public domain" and to "alleviate the restrictive trend in information technology" caused by a "dramatic rise in medical research data subscription costs" [3]. …