President Bush has signed the omnibus appropriations bill (Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007, HR. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. Researchers funded by the NIH will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.
Worldwide, this now makes a total of 35 OA mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far, see ROARMAP: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/. The NIH now joins 6 of the 7 UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and many other prestigious providers of research funding in acknowledging the immense value of open access to research publications and scientific progress.
To researchers, this means a far greater volume of essential research publications are now available free to all with access to the internet. So congratulations to all who have worked so hard to reach this immensely important end of year present.
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