Public Access Mandate for NIH Research

PUBLIC ACCESS MANDATE FOR NIH RESEARCH BECOMES LAW
On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764s) , which includes a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide open online access to all of its federally-funded research findings. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

In 2005, the NIH agreed to make research findings available if its researchers agreed to do so, but with this new mandate, all agency-funded investigators will 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 these peer-reviewed articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.