Scholarly Communications News

With the signing of the omnibus appropriations bill, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is directed to make mandatory its policy for funded investigators to submit final versions of their manuscripts to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's digital archive. Previously, researchers were encouraged to make submissions to the publicly accessible database but the new provision will require all NIH grantees to deposit their research papers within 12 months after publication. The legislation comes after many years of lobbying by advocacy groups for such open access language and just as many years of opposition by publishers.

The NIH maintains a website with information and tutorials on the Manuscript Submission System and the Public Access Policy at http://www.nihms.nih.gov/

For additional information, see the news release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, Dec. 26, 2007

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus e-newsletter reports that the University of California's eScholarship Repository has recently exceeded five million full-text downloads, according to the university.

The eScholarship Repository, a service of the California Digital Library, allows scholars in the University of California system to submit their work to a central location where any users may easily access it free of charge. Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the CDL publishing group, says the number shows that both content seekers and creators have embraced the service, allaying concerns that researchers wouldn't contribute to the repository.

From their web site at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/ the University of California has announced a pilot project co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian. The brief announcement reads as follows...

"The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.

An 18-month pilot program, BRII will subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in, as well as the budgetary impacts of, these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus."

Additionally offered is a new program announcement, a program description, frequently asked questions and instructions for application and reimbursement.