Permanent, for Now: Bill Solidifies NIHMandate but Legislative Challenge Looms
Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 03/13/2009
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- NIH policy made permanent
- Library community supportive
- Conyers bill would repeal policy
(This article first appeared in the March 12 issue of the LJ Academic Newswire.)
Public access to research just got a big legislative boost. With passage late Tuesday of the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy mandate, enacted last April as part of the 2008 appropriations act, has become permanent.
As first reported in Tuesday's LJ Academic Newswire, the mandate, which requires that NIH grantees make research articles funded by the agency publicly available and searchable online via PubMed Central within 12 months after publication in a journal, was subject to annual renewal. However, a clause in this year's bill requires the NIH director to enforce the policy "in the current fiscal year and thereafter."
Gains solidified
The move solidifies the gains made by public access advocates, led by the the library community, particularly by SPARC, which has pushed for public access since 2004. In a statement, SPARC executive director Heather Joseph, thanked "a wide coalition of patients, libraries, researchers, publishers, students, and taxpayers," and said that that "successful implementation of this policy will unlock the potential of this research to benefit the public as a whole."
New challenge
The battle, however, is far from over. Earlier this year Rep. John Conyers reintroduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (HR 801), a bill that would undo the policy and would outlaw similar public access mandates.
Despite widespread criticism of HR 801, in a sharp exchange with Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig and Public Library of Science's Michael Eisen on the Huffington Post blog, Conyers suggested he was committed to seeing HR 801 through.
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