Within the omnibus US spending bill is a provision calling for greater public access to federally funded research, ScienceInsider's Jocelyn Kaiser reports.
More than a thousand pages into the bill, a section dealing with the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education says that agencies that spend more than $100 million on research and development have to have a policy in place for researchers to submit "machine-readable" copies of their peer reviewed and accepted papers to the funding agency and for those papers to be freely available online within 12 months.
This policy affects agencies including the National Institutes of Health, which implemented a similar stance in 2008, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Education, Kaiser says. She adds that it does not affect the National Science Foundation, though that agency is developing a similar policy stemming from a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directive.
“This is an important step toward making federally funded scientific research available for everyone to use online at no cost,” Heather Joseph, the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, says in a statement.