Press Release: BioMed Central welcomes the new National Institutes of Health Public

[Grace Baynes <Grace@biomedcentral.com>]

An announcement from BioMed Central of possible interest to the readers of
this list. Apologies for cross-posting.

PRESS RELEASE

BioMed Central welcomes the new National Institutes of Health Public
Access policy

London, 4 February 2005

BioMed Central welcomes the announcement of the US National Institutes of
Health (NIH) new public access policy. The NIH calls on all of its
grantees to deposit articles resulting from their NIH-funded research in
the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and make them freely
available within 12 months.

BioMed Central anticipates that many other funding bodies worldwide will
now follow the example set by NIH.

All NIH grantees now have a new factor to take into account when choosing
where they wish to publish their research. To fulfil the NIH request,
authors publishing with most of the traditional subscription publishers
will be expected to go through a process of resubmitting their papers to
the PubMed Central repository. In addition, they will often need to update
their manuscript version with the changes introduced in the publication
process, as many publishers specify that only the author's version of the
manuscript can be submitted to archives.

Those who choose to publish in any of BioMed Central's Open Access
journals, which cover all areas of biology and medicine, are assured that
the published version of their paper will be placed in PubMed Central for
them, immediately and without any need for additional work from them.
Researchers are thus saved the time and effort of going through the
deposition process themselves.

This significant benefit is in addition to the rapid and high quality peer
review, fast publication and high visibility of BioMed Central's Open
Access journals.

BioMed Central urges all researchers in the life and medical sciences to
fulfil the NIH request and to submit their future manuscripts to one of
the 130 Open Access journals published by BioMed Central.

The NIH announcement can be found in full at:
[http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm]

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Press Office Contacts:
Grace Baynes for BioMed Central
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7631 9988 
E-mail: press@biomedcentral.com

BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent online
publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to
the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This
commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential
to the rapid and efficient communication of science. In addition to
open-access original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews and
other subscription-based content. This email has been scanned by Postini.
For more information please visit http://www.postini.com

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