Neurobiol Lipids welcomes NIH Public Access policy

[Alexei Koudinov <koudinov@inbox.ru>]

Neurobiology of Lipids welcomes the new National Institutes of Health
Public Access policy

7 February 2005

Neurobiology of Lipids (NoL) welcomes the announcement by the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) new "Policy on Enhancing Public Access to
Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research" effective May 2,
2005. The NIH requests the Agency grant recipients to deposit resulting
publications in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central (PMC, a
free governmental archive of the life sciences literature) within 12
months since originally published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The article deposition in NIH archive will no doubt benefit the scholars
themselves. This is because deposition in PMC archive will ensure the
publication is preserved for future generations and gets maximum and
barrier-free exposure to both peers and the public. For the Policy wording
on these and other issues (such as reliability of article access at PMC
site and their integration with other NIH Databases) please see original
NIH document:

Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from
NIH-Funded Research.

Notice Number: NOT-OD-05-022 (Release Date: February 3, 2005; Effective
Date: May 2, 2005).
Issued by National Institutes of Health (NIH)

While the new Policy calls for the voluntary submission of final author
manuscripts and does not affect the ability to copyright, all NIH grantees
now have a new issue to consider when selecting the journal to publish at.
To fulfill the NIH request, authors publishing in the majority of the
traditional journals (i.e. those where authors transfer copyright to the
publisher) will have to go through a process of resubmitting their papers
to the PubMed Central archive. Moreover, the authors will often need to
select for PMC archive the manuscript version with the changes introduced
during the publication procedure, because many publishers (ex. Elsevier)
allow archiving of the author's version of the manuscript only.

Neurobiology of Lipids has met the National Library of Medicine quality
requirement for PubMed Central archiving and is presently successfully
working on bringing its' prior publications' collection into the
Extensible Markup Language (XML) files' format (suitable for deposition in
PMC) using just released latest version 2.0 of the National Library of
Medicine XML Document Type Definition (DTD) for journal publishing.

While taking the advantage of an irreversible Internet and desktop
publishing technology development and their end user availability at
almost no cost, Neurobiology of Lipids is also originating the research
project aiming to develop the software tool that will make direct
publishing (to an appropriate XML file compliant with NIH DTD) as simple,
as web form submission (that everyone uses while performing on-line bank
transaction, interlibrary loan request, an Institution internal services
operation or thousand other purposes). Such tool will be essential for
independent journals (encouraged by Neurobiology of Lipids and similarly
built on a concept of a non-profit model for cost-effective independent
scholar journals), their authors, Academic Institutions setting their own
archives, and individual scientists, willing to deposit their articles in
a modern XML file format. NoL is open for partnership by any interested
party and has open opportunities for Graduate students to participate in
this and other projects...

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