On December 26th President Bush signed a very large appropriations act that will impact many Hopkins researchers. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764) requires the NIH (National Institutes of Health) to make public the results of any research it supports. This means that any journal articles reporting on research that used NIH funding must be deposited in PubMed Central and made openly available to the public within one year.
You can read more about this new mandate at the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a group that supported this legislation. Peter Suber’s blog on Open Access News has several entries about the new legislation.
If you have any questions about this you can ask your librarian or contact a member of the Scholarly Communications Group, which supports Open Access here at JHU.
