Library Groups Applaud CURES Bill as Speeding Access to Vital Biomedical Research

The American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association have issued a Press Release praising the CURES Bill, which would greatly strengthen the NIH Public Access Policy.

Peter Suber has posted a helpful Excerpt on Open Access News. Here is the portion explaining what the bill is designed to do:

Among the requirements of the bill is the establishment of free public access to articles stemming from research funded by agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), including NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Under the proposed legislation, articles published in a peer-reviewed journal would be required to be made publicly available within months via NIH's popular PubMed Central online digital archive. The groups note that although some final electronic manuscripts are made available now on PubMed, many are not—and delays in posting research on PubMed sometimes stall public access to important articles for up to a year. "Depriving researchers and members of the public of the findings of research funded by taxpayers is not only wrong, it can also slow down the discovery of new and improved treatment for diseases," said Miriam Nisbet, a spokesperson for the library coalition.