In 24 hours, Congress is holding a hearing on a bill that could kill public access policies like the recently enacted National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy.
“From the outset publishers have maintained the NIH’s mandatory public access policy encroaches on publishers’ ability to manage copyrighted content. Just before the mandatory public access bill’s passage in December 2007, publishers succeeded in adding a key phrase: that the NIH policy must be implemented ‘in a manner consistent with copyright law.’ The hearing on Thursday could address complaints such as those voiced by AAP VP for legal and government affairs, Allan Adler, who has long maintained that the current policy was never fully examined by Congress because ‘the statutory authority for the NIH policy was enacted as a rider on appropriations legislation without hearings or studies to assess its merits.’ The NIH mandatory public access policy, strongly supported by librarians, requires researchers to deposit their final papers funded whole or in part by NIH, in the PubMed Central repository. Notice of the hearing and pending legislation comes as submission statistics for PMC indicate the mandatory policy is having a dramatic effect. For July 2008, submissions to PMC nearly hit 4000 (3999). In July 2007, under the NIH’s ‘voluntary’ policy, PMC saw just 721 submission.”
[From Library Journal Academic Newswire]
