Managing Your Intellectual Property

On this Friday’s National Public Radio show “Science Friday”, host Ira Flatow will interview former National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus to discuss the NIH Public Access Policy which went into effect this week.  Varmus is a founder of the Public Library of Science and a proponent of open access to research

Following a public hearing on March 20, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking further public comments on the implementation of its public access policy.  Comments are being accepted until May 31, 2008, on the following:

• Recommendations for alternative implementation approaches to those already reflected in the policy;
• Recommendations for monitoring and ensuring compliance with the policy;
• Additional policy-related information, training, or communications that would be helpful.

The policy requires that final, peer-reviewed articles resulting from NIH-funded research be submitted to that National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, where they will be made publicly accessible no later than twelve months following publication.  Members of the public, including UCLA University Librarian Gary E. Strong, submitted more than four hundred comments to the March 20 hearing, with sixty percent supporting the policy as is and fifteen percent requesting that the twelve-month delay be shortened.

President Bush has signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 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 will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central, where full texts of the articles will be publicly available no later than twelve months after publication in a journal.

Further information is available on the Alliance for Taxpayer Access Web page.

In a July 27 editorial, the Los Angeles Times supports a provision of a National Institutes of Health funding bill that stipulates “the results of the studies the government funds must be made freely available online within 12 months of their publication.”

The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that its funded research be made publicly available on the Internet. The Senate’s 2008 appropriations bill requires that NIH-funded researchers deposit in the National Library of Medicine’s online archive an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication in a journal. Articles would become publicly available no later than twelve months after publication. The bill will go to the full Senate later this summer, and the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to consider a similar measure in July. More information is available at www.taxpayeraccess.org.