Sci research articles becoming more affordable (I hope)

Steve B. writes the following:

Hello all,

I just finished participating in a national conference call concerning free public access to publications funded entirely or in part by the National Institutes of Health. This call was headed by Dr. Elia A. Zerhouni, Director of the NIH. Here is their new policy in a nutshell: everyone who receives NIH grant money will have up to 12 months after the publication of his/her final peer-reviewed manucript to submit it to NIH for placing on Pubmed Central for free access by the public. Details
will be worked out by a "Public Access Advisory Group" [this may not be its final name]. This group will write a guidance document that will be given to all NIH grantees for their compliance.

Some notes and details--
* authors have up until 12 months after the publication of the final manuscript to send it to Pubmed Central, which means that they could submit it within the first month if they so wish--but just no later than the 12th month
* at this time NIH will have no penalties for authors who fail to sumbit their manuscripts (my observation only: but they will probably have a hard time getting any more grants from any of the divisions of NIH)
* as expected publishers were not happy
* one caller pointed out that the draft guidelines had called a release period of 6 months and asked why the final guidelines changed from 6 months to 12 months. Dr. Zerhouni only replied that the 6 months was never written in stone and that 12 months seemed reasonable (my observation only: publishers are already up in arms; if the schedule was 6 months they might be murderous--12 months seems like a good comprimise)
* I gave the code to talk during this call at about the 10-minute mark into the call, but never got to say anything because I must have had a bajillion other callers ahead of me
* Expect more about this--sign up for the NIH press release service at the link I've given below
* Hey, it looks like we librarians have won one! Wahoo!
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1. Here is Pubmed Central--
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

2. Here is the page to sign up for NIH press releases--
http://list.nih.gov/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=nihpress&A=1