The US' National Institutes of Health (NIH), for the past several years, has implemented an open access policy as mandated by the Congress. The policy requires any work derived from NIH funding to be sent to the NIH in digital form for public access. There have been periodic attempts to reverse the policy. Yet, it has been so successful that the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has requested public input on an extension of the rules to all federally funded research. In addition, a consortium of US research institutions is now putting its weight to turn the potential OSTP policy into law.
The new legislation, a Senate bill called the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) that was introduced last year, seeks to ensure that any policy adopted by executive order cannot be overturned when a new administration takes charge.
The research grants provided to nongovernmental institutions total over $60 billion. If passed, the bill would require any agency that hands out over $100 million in grants to set up a method for grant recipients to send publications in electronic form within six months of their appearing in print. However, the NIH stipulates a year following publication. The submission could be the final document sent in to the academic journal or, if the journal permits, the fully formatted version that is published online following typesetting.
The agencies would be responsible for generating a bibliography and archiving the material. Depending on budget allocations, the agencies may have to choose between meeting this new obligation and funding more research.
The bill purportedly recognises the value of peer review. Researchers will be required to submit versions that include all changes demanded by reviewers. Meeting presentations, preliminary data, lab notes and other material that hasn't been reviewed thoroughly are specifically excluded. The bill is receiving significant support from the research community itself. A group of major research universities, including Harvard, Cornell, California-Berkely and Stanford recently released an open letter in support of the legislation.
The publishing industry is the only group that is expected to object the bill. Some publishers feel that six months is enough time to extract most of the value of their role in typesetting and organising peer review. While some publishers have embraced these policies as a way of broadening the impact of the work they publish, others have resisted.
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