In October 2008, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that required researchers who are funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their publications accessible to the public through PubMed which is adminstered by the National Library of Medicine. One news story on this is provided by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), an excerpt is available at the following (if your institution has a subscription, you should be able to acces full text):
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/335/7626/906 However, the current Congress is considering a bill, HR 801, which would end this program. Again, BMJ has publicly available excerpt of a news story at: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/338/jun01_2/b2199 Folks can probably find other sources of info on this bill, such as the following article by Heather Joseph in the newsletter of the Association of College and Research Libraries: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crlnews/2009/apr/fairtowhom.cfm PubMed, as many here know, is the biomedical equivalent of PsycInfo and having access to publications of research that was originally funded by U.S. taxpayers through it make it a real value-added resource. I won't rant about evil, profit-driven publishers but I do suggest that those with APA connections make it known that the APA should do something *cough*lobby*cough* the Congress against this bill. If one were so inclined, U.S. Citizens might contact their congressional representative (one way to do so is through the following websites: http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=sparc http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/fcrwa.html People in other countries *cough*Canadians*cough* might want to contact their professional organizations about this matters and/or write direstly to Congressman John Conyers who introduced the bill: http://conyers.house.gov/ -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
