Thursday, March 6, 2008

ARL White Paper on NIH Open Access mandate

With NIH Compliance Date Approaching, SPARC, ARL Issue White Paper

On April 7, 2008, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be required to deposit their articles in the PubMed Central online archive, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. To encourage and ensure compliance, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Science Commons have released Complying with the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations and Options http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/nih/copyright.html. The free paper is designed to help "provosts, research administrators, and campus counsel understand their institution's copyright-related obligations and options under the new Congressionally mandated policy."

The analysis was prepared by Michael Carroll, attorney, copyright expert, and faculty member at Villanova University law school. Carroll has long been involved with copyright issues as a member of the Creative Commons board and an advisor to Science Commons. In 2004 he worked with SPARC to develop the SPARC Author Addendum http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/ designed to help authors properly reserve rights to deposit their works in open online archives. Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, said the paper is a "great tool to help administrators jumpstart the local planning process."

No comments: