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January 18, 2008

More on the NIH Mandate from the journal, Science

The January 18th Science adds or clarifies several points about the recent NIH mandate (see previous posting), including:

  • NIH is not offering grantees additional money to make their articles open access, but will allow grantees to use their grant money for this purpose.
  • "To give scientists a nudge, NIH will require them to include the PMC number when they cite their own papers in grant applications and progress reports. Other possible ways of forcing scofflaws to comply range from having a program director call with a reminder to "the most extreme: suspending funds," says NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Norka Ruiz Bravo. "We hope we're not going to get there," she says."
  • "The new law puts NIH in line with some other funding agencies that require grantees to send their papers to PMC or a U.K. version of the archive; these include the U.K.'s Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust, which adopted such policies in 2006, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Bethesda, Maryland, whose rule goes into effect this month. All three institutions require that papers be posted within 6 months of publication in a journal" whereas the NIH mandate requires access within 12 months of publication.

Not surprisingly, publishers will be (and have been) monitoring what their authors put in PubMed Central:

...some publishers say they will need to police the site for articles mistakenly posted, such as those not yet released from the journal's embargo or those published before 2005. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, says APS asked NIH to remove 78 papers last year, and he expects "hundreds" of similar errors when the mandatory policy kicks in. Lipman acknowledges that NIH had to remove some papers. But complying with copyright, he says, is not NIH's responsibility; it's "between the author and the publisher."

For a growing list of other funder-mandates, take a look at ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies).

Posted by Katie Newman at January 18, 2008 10:08 AM