It seems Sen. James Inhofe's amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill that would affect the NIH open access mandate.
So what is this OA thing Inhofe is wanting to amend? Well this what it says without amendments...
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
A good summary of legislation surrounding the topic can be found here.
Folks wiser than me, on the specifics, say that Inhofe is adding text that is very similar to Canadian legislation that allows any publishers a loophole to block OA access after the set period of time -- if it doesn't comply with the publishing house policy. So I guess publisher policy supercedes public access to government funded research?
If you have an opinion one way or another on the topic drop Sen Inhofe a line and let him know how you feel.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment