The group of publishers that have signed on to the "DC Principles" have presented a proposal to NIH as an alternative to the agency's manuscript submission system.
In a letter to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D., 57 medical and scientific publishers propose that NIH use existing links from the citations and abstracts in MEDLINE to the full-text of journal articles on the publishers' websites instead of creating a separate repository of articles within PubMed Central.
According to the group's press release, the proposal would make over 1 million research articles available to the public "overnight and at no cost to taxpayers."