National Institutes of Health Open Access Policy
A newly announced NIH Public Access Policy endorses open access repositories as a home for the research products of NIH-funded research.
The Policy
A major research funding organization in the federal government, the NIH recently announced a new policy regarding internet posting of
NIH funded research. Under the policy, NIH funded authors are encouraged to place the results of their research in PubMed Central, an open
access repository. Deposited works are then freely available to the public without any additional fees other than access to the Internet.
To read more about this policy visit:
http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/.
Implications for Scholars
The NIH policy is one of many steps in the movement toward greater access to scholarly communication. The University of Maryland maintains its own open access repository called DRUM (Digital Repository at the University of Maryland). Designed for faculty members,DRUM provides a home for scholarly articles, conference proceedings, working papers, etc.
Visit DRUM at http://www.lib.umd.edu/drum/index.jsp.
Learn more about the scholarly communication movement at http://www.lib.umd.edu/ETC/scholar_comm.html.
