While NIH's Public Access Policy could, and PLoS believes should, have been stronger in several respects, it sets an important precedent for all sponsors of scientific research. "The US government has now endorsed the principle that the results of federally funded research should be freely available to the public," said Michael B. Eisen, Ph.D., co-founder of PLoS. "Scientists and the scientific community now have an historic opportunity make this principle a reality."
PLoS urges all other funding agencies, in the US and abroad, to adopt the progressive components of the NIH policy, and to accompany them with stronger incentives for compliance and shorter periods of allowable delay prior to public access. PLoS urges all scientists to seize this opportunity to ensure that their works are made freely available to their colleagues and the public.
A significant aspect of the plan is its unambiguous stipulation that the authors of NIH-funded research articles are empowered to determine when their papers will be made available to the public, regardless of the policies of the journals in which their works are published. NIH grantees now have an added incentive to publish their work in open-access journals that deposit their full contents in PubMed Central immediately upon publication.
PLoS commends NIH's commitment to establish a Public Access Advisory Working Group, also announced today, which will serve to monitor the implementation and effects of the new policy over the coming months and years. PLoS, itself, will be collaborating with other interested organizations to design and provide tools to make it as easy as possible for authors to exercise their vested authority to make their works freely available online as soon after publication as they see fit, as NIH has urged them to.
PLoS thanks NIH Director Elias Zerhouni for his leadership on this important issue, and looks forward to an ongoing dialogue on the imperatives for timely public access to the products of publicly funded scientific and medical research.
CONTACT:
Helen Doyle
Director
Development and Strategic Alliances
Public Library of Science
185 Berry Street, Ste. 1300
San Francisco, CA USA 94107
415-624-1200
415-546-4090 (fax)
hdoyle@plos.org
Michael B. Eisen, Ph.D
PLoS co-founder
Public Library of Science
185 Berry Street, Suite 1300
San Francisco, CA USA 94107
510-604-2712
415-546-4090
mbeisen@lbl.gov
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical research a public resource, founded by Dr. Harold Varmus, Dr. Patrick Brown, and Dr. Michael Eisen. PLoS publishes open-access journals of original peer-reviewed research, including PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, which are available at no cost to anyone in the world with a connection to the Internet. More information can be found at .