NIH Public Access Policy made permanent

President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

The NIH policy was previously implemented with a provision that was subject to annual renewal. Since the implementation of the revised policy the percentage of eligible manuscripts deposited into PMC has increased significantly, with over 3,000 new manuscripts being deposited each month. The PubMed Central database is a part of a valuable set of public database resources at the NIH, which are accessed by more than 2 million users each day.

(via SPARC)

International Symposium on Peer Reviewing

From the announcement for the International Symposium on Peer Reviewing:

Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that "peer review works well as it is". (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192).

"A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research." (Horrobin, 2001)

Horrobin concludes that peer review "is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance." (Horrobin, 2001). This has been statistically proven and reported by an increasing number of journal editors.

But, "Peer Review is one of the sacred pillars of the scientific edifice" (Goodstein, 2000), it is a necessary condition in quality assurance for Scientific/Engineering publications, and "Peer Review is central to the organization of modern science…why not apply scientific [and engineering] methods to the peer review process" (Horrobin, 2001).

This is the purpose of the International Symposium on Peer Reviewing: ISPR being organized in the context of The 3rd International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management: KGCM 2009, which will be held on July 10-13, 2009, in Orlando, Florida, USA.

Legal Education Commons launches

The Legal Education Commons , a source of open-access, full-text teaching materials for law school courses, was launched on January 26 by the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. See the CALI announcement here and the Berkman announcement here. The Legal Education Commons (LEC) reportedly contains more than 700,000 full text cases and other court documents, plus approximately 300 illustrations from CALI tutorials. The copyrighted materials in the Commons are governed by a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (BY-SA).

Open Access Day is October 14!

October 14th, 2008 has been declared Open Access Day! Libraries, publishers and institutions around the world will be drawing attention to Open Access and celebrating the successes of this movement so far. Sponsored by SPARC, Public Library of Science and Students for Free Culture, Open Access Day includes a live video webcast and will be hosted in over 100 locations across the world, combined with a variety of local promotional activities to share information about the issues of Open Access. More information about this international event can be found here: http://openaccessday.org.


For an overview of the issues of Open Access, please see the Scholarly Communication & Publishing web site: http://www.library.wisc.edu/scp/openaccess/.


At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we have a number of promotional efforts in place and will be hosting the live webcast at the Memorial Union at 6:00pm (TITU). Everyone is welcome. The Libraries Web Site will have a promotional banner on October 14th that will lead to a special web page defining and celebrating Open Access: http://www.library.wisc.edu/scp/oaday/.

Open Access Publishing Support Fund

The Scholarly Communication and Publishing Committee has instituted a new, streamlined process for applying to the Open Access Publishing Support Fund. This fund covers a percentage of the cost of author submission fees, to support the ability of researchers to publish in established open access peer-reviewed journals and peer-reviewed journals that have an open access option.

For more information, see the fund description page. To apply for funds, fill out the application form.

PubMed search tool for PMCIDs

Researchers subject to the NIH Public Access Policy take note: there is a new way to discover PMCIDs for articles you need to cite in grant proposals.

PubMed has added a two-way conversion tool between PubMed IDs (PMIDs) and PubMed Central IDs (PMCIDs). It accepts any number of identifiers, to make batch-processing possible.

Remember that citing the PMCID, not the PMID, demonstrates compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

Mathematics and Biology Symposium

A Mathematics and Biology Symposium (register here) devoted to data-driven science will be held September 2–3 at the Ebling Symposium Center. From the event summary:

Dramatic, continuing growth in the amounts and types of data available for deep understanding of life is fueling profound advances in the analytical tools and modes of inquiry employed in biological research. This symposium is borne of the conviction that breakthroughs in 21st century biology and biomedicine increasingly will come from strategies based in mathematics, computer sciences, and related disciplines. Similarly, challenges in biological research are providing raw material and impetus for advances in mathematics, statistics, computing, engineering and associated fields. Nurturing these synergistic relationships thus offers profound benefits across the full spectrum of biological, mathematical and physical sciences.