Omnibus Bill Gives Nudge to Public Access | Science/AAAS | News

"Congress took a small step toward expanding a requirement that science agencies make federally funded research papers publicly available in the omnibus spending bill approved yesterday. But the 1-year provision applies only to certain agencies, and the research behemoth among them—the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—already has a similar policy. The language is buried on page 1020 of the 1582-page bill in a section that covers the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (see excerpt below). It states that agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on research and development must develop a policy requiring that a “machine-readable version” of peer-reviewed, accepted papers that have any federal support be submitted to the funding agency. The policy must also make the papers free online no more than 12 months after publication in a journal. That’s pretty much what NIH already does with its 2008 public access policy. The agency requires that NIH-funded investigators submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts for posting in the free PubMed Central archive within a year. There are a few differences between the NIH policy and the bill language, according to this analysis from The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog written from the perspective of traditional publishers. For example, the omnibus bill does not stipulate that the paper be deposited in a particular repository ... The language applies to a number of health and other agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Education ... What the bill doesn’t do is mandate public access at other major science agencies, most notably the National Science Foundation. Those agencies are already working to comply with a February 2013 directive from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) requiring that they develop public access policies with a 12-month posting requirement (with some wiggle room on the 12 months). But Congress didn’t use the bill to codify the government-wide OSTP policy, instead merely asking in an accompanying report (language below) that agencies report on their progress within 45 days.  The Association of American Publishers was not yet prepared to comment on the public access provisions in the bill, according to spokesperson Andi Sporkin ..."