NIH Holds Meeting on Open Access

Zerhouni NIH PHOTO Research funded by NIH may soon come with a new requirement: Journal articles published based on this work will have to be deposited onto PubMed Central, the agency's free digital biomedical literature archive. Just how and in what time frame such publications should be deposited was the topic of a closed meeting held by NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni late last month. Zerhouni asked more than 40 publishers and editors from 33 organizations, including the American Chemical Society, for input on how the agency can ensure open access without significantly impacting the current publication system. The meeting follows the release of a recent House Appropriations Committee report that called on the agency to develop a mechanism where publications of NIH-funded research would have to be deposited on PubMed six months after publication (C&EN, July 26, page 12). The language in the report also says that papers for which NIH pays the publishing costs should be placed on PubMed immediately upon publication. The report calls for NIH to prepare an open access plan by Dec. 1. The agency is expected to hold more meetings on this topic before making any decisions.