Scholarly News

Public Access Mandate - Resources to ease the transition

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has posted resources to assist researchers with the submission of manuscripts to Pubmed Central. NIH funded researchers will be expected to submit using the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system in order to comply to the Public Access Mandate.

Read the complete NLM Technical Bulletin and access the NIHMS help documentation.

SPARKY Contest Winners Announced

Excerpt from the SPARC press release, January 23, 2008:
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the winners of the first SPARKY Awards. The 2007 contest called on entrants to imaginatively illustrate in a short video the value of sharing ideas and information of all kinds.
The three winning entries offer a glimpse of student views on the importance of access to information, and feature an animated look at the most basic benefits of sharing, a film noir-style crime investigation using the Internet, and a tongue-in-cheek documentary on Open Access.

View the winning videos

PUBLIC ACCESS MANDATE MADE LAW

Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), Press Release December 26, 2007

PUBLIC ACCESS MANDATE MADE LAW
President Bush signs omnibus appropriations bill,
including National Institutes of Health research access provision

Excerpt:
Washington, D.C. - December 26, 2007 - President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research...Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

Complete press release