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Public Access Week: Discuss the new NIH Open Access Policy that starts tomorrow
Martin Fenner
Sunday, 06 April 2008 22:11 UTC
Starting tomorrow, the new public access policy for most papers from work supported by NIH will be in effect. I believe that this policy will have a profound effect on how we submit and publish scientific papers – even if we don’t receive any grant money from the NIH. As we have discussed elsewhere, this should be talked about in more detail in a Public Access Week – either here in this Forum or in the form of blog posts.
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Replies
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A welcome second-best in Scotland
Graham Steel is active in patient advocacy, especially for those with Motor Neurone Disease (MND). But he doesn’t have an institutional affiliation, and therefore doesn’t have access to TA medical journals.
NHS Scotland grants access to the medical literature it licenses—”over 5000 online journals, over 80 major databases, over 5000 electronic books”—to all NHS Scotland staff, students and partners , and just decided that Steel qualifies because of his patient advocacy.
From Steel’s blog account:
I appear to have qualified since I genuinely am involved in Patient Advocacy here in Scotland. I am advised that this service in UK terms, is currently only available in Scotland.
IMHO this means that anyone in Scotland who for example is providing care/help/ support to a relative/friend/patient etc. should, like any other member of the public, also qualify for an Athens login, cut through “Toll Access” red tape and gain access to publicly funded research etc. that they have already paid for.
Which brings me to a common sense solution
But of course, better and much simpler still, in this day and age, is of course to make such material OA in the first place and rid ourselves of an unnecessary and unwanted “password only” Draconian System !
PS: Kudos to NHS Scotland for opening the door to Steel and others like him.
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Sunday, April 06, 2008
In honor of new OA mandate at the NIH, which will take effect for most grantees on April 7, some of the Nature Network bloggers are discussing the idea of making next week OA week. (Thanks to Graham Steel.) The idea is simply for participating bloggers to blog about OA or the NIH policy at least once during the week.
I’ll be blogging about OA and NIH policy all week (and all year…), so I’m already in. If you have a blog, join in. We can’t do enough to educate our colleagues and the public about OA.
BTW, if you take part, please mention at some point that the NIH is collecting public comments on the policy until May 1. It would be a shame to generate a new wave of support for the policy and not have it show up when the NIH is evaluating responses. Publishers who oppose the policy are sure to submit their comments.
Permanent link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 4/06/2008 12:19:00 PM
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