Article on NIH OA Policy in Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education for May 11, 2006 has an article on the state of the National Institute of Health (NIH) open-access policy after one year ("NIH Has Little to Celebrate on 1st Anniversary of Its Open-Access Policy, but Changes May Be on Way"). There's not much in the article that is new to readers of OA Librarian but it is a nice summary of the situation. Here are a few things that are mentioned:

• The NIH policy requesting that authors deposit articles borne from NIH-funded research in an OA repository no later than 12 months after publication has generally failed, with less than 4% compliance.
• In November, an NIH working group recommended that the deposition be made mandatory and that the window for deposit be shortened to six months. A deputy director of NIH says that the organization is looking at changes to the policy but is not ready to implement anything yet.
• Some publishers want to keep the policy as is and are concerned about the effects possible changes may have on subscriptions. There is a brief section in the article dealing with whether or not access to articles in OA repositories actually has an impact on subscriptions.
• There is a short mention of the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act, which would mandate deposition of articles based on research funded by 11 US federal government agencies within a six month period.

The Chronicle article can be found at
http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/05/2006051101n.htm?rss but, unfortunately, it's not OA; it's limited to subscribers.