NIH Requirements for Public Access to Journal Articles

The NIH open access requirement has been broadly advertised. Here is the NIH's FAQ on the topic and below is Springer's announcement of it. This is a description aimed at the authors/faculty and includes instructions for complying with the requirement.

Dear SpringerAlert Subscriber,

Do you receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? If so, as from April 2008 you will be required to deposit the final manuscript of your journal articles in PubMed Central and ensure free availability (open access) within 12 months of publication.

You will be pleased to hear that Springer journals are fully geared up for that requirement. All you have to do is opt for open access publication of your article through Springer's Open Choice - you will be given that option as soon as your article has been accepted for publication after peer review - and we will handle the administrative process.

Springer will take care of the immediate deposit in PubMed Central and what's more, not of the manuscript, but of the final, published article. And it will also be available with open access right away, and not just after 12 months.

The cost of Open Choice is - as stated on the NIH web site - a permissible cost in your grant so please take care to budget for it.

Publishing with open access in Springer journals completely takes away any worries you might have about complying with the new NIH rules for grantees when it comes to publishing your research results. We look forward to the submission of your next paper.

Best regards,
Your Springer Open Choice Team

U.S. Govt. Plans to Close Internet site Consolidating Economic Indicator Reports

U.S. Govt. Plans to Close Internet site Consolidating Economic Indicator Reports

The website was awarded a best of web by Forbes magazine.
The web site can, for now, can still be located at: http://www.economicIndicators.gov/

If you wish to continue to receive this data, you will need to acquire a temporary subscription to STAT-USA.

This is the Disclaimer from the http://www.economicIndicators.gov web site

Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service (http://www.economicindicators.gov) will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008.

Economic Indicators.gov is brought to you by the Economics and Statistics Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Our mission is to provide timely access to the daily releases of key economic indicators from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.

You may link to the most recent release by clicking on the report name in the table below. You may also subscribe to our *free Subscription Service to have these files emailed or faxed directly to you as soon as they are released.

comments on Harvard's OA / IR policy

A post by Noah Gray in the Nature Neuroscience blog on the Harvard policy critiques the all encompassing and vague nature of the policy. A comment from Steven Harnard of the American Scientist Open Access Forum on Gray's post proposes some alternate wording to optimize the effectiveness of the declaration.

Harvard Faculty Unanimously Agree To Establish Open Access Repository

An article in the February 13, 2008 Library Journal announces that

Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) yesterday unanimously approved a motion that would compel faculty to deposit their research in an open access (OA) repository managed by the library to be made freely available to anyone via the Internet.