With effect from April 7th 2008, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requires all peer-reviewed articles resulting from research carried out with NIH funding to be deposited in the PubMed Central archive, and to be made freely available within at most 12 months of publication.
If you are an NIH grantee or employee, publishing in one of BioMed Central’s 180+ open access journals is an easy and effective way to ensure automatic and optimal compliance with the NIH’s policy.
Benefits for NIH-funded researchers of publishing in one of BioMed Central’s open access journals
- All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are automatically deposited in PubMed Central
- The official final version of the article is made freely available with no delay or embargo period
- Articles published in BioMed Central journals provide true open access thanks to an open access license agreement which allows (and encourages) re-distribution and re-use.
Inconveniences for NIH-funded authors when publishing in a subscription-only journal
- The author will generally be required to manually deposit a pre-publication manuscript version of their article in PubMed Central.
- The
article must then go through a separate markup, layout and checking
process, resulting in two versions of the article, an "official"
Publisher version and an "unofficial" PubMed Central version - The
article will not be freely available during the embargo period
following publication (typically 12 months), yet this is the very time
when the article is of most interest to other researchers - Exclusive
rights to article generally remain with the publisher and so, even when
the embargo is lifted, re-distribution and re-use remain prohibited.
Given these advantages, publishing in one of BioMed Central’s open
access journal’s is a natural choice for NIH-funded researchers.
Automatic deposit means you can spend less time depositing your
article, and more time on carrying out your research, and immediate
open access to the official published version ensures maximum
visibility for your research.
Submitting your research to one of BioMed Central’s peer reviewed
open access journals is easy – find out more by following the link
below:
Open Access week: 7th – 11th April 2008
From Open Access News yesterday:-
“OA week
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.”
Is it 1st April?
I’ve got nothing better to do than re-submit articles twice.
I am so bored with all my free time.
Does anyone read the open access journals?
Thanks for your memo. Why not repeat it weekly with a list of all of your journals in the same memo, rather than having to link to the list?
Graham Ellis-Davies’ asks whether people read open access journals. Graham – check out BioMed Central’s Most viewed page which lists access counts for the last 30 days, to get an idea of how much visibilty open access journals can give.