Scholarly Publishing Update

NIH received more than 6,000 comments during the comment period for its proposal to enhance public access to NIH-funded research results (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html). The original proposal was to require that all NIH-funded researchers deposit copies of their journal articles in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) archives within six months of publication, but because of heavy lobbying from publishers and some associations and societies, the proposal was changed from “requiring” to “requesting” that articles be deposited in PMC. The proposal was approved by the US House of Representatives in the summer and by the Senate in November. Because of the large number of comments to be reviewed, NIH has postponed its original December 1 deadline for developing an implementation plan. Approximately 12% of the articles indexed in Medline are written by NIH-funded researchers.

BioMed Central (BMC), the largest open access publisher, has made much progress since its establishment in May of 2000. BMC highlights for 2004 include the following:

• Impact factors for BMC journals compared well with other journals
• Article submissions to BMC journals increased more than 100%
• The total number of BMC journals reached 126
• An average of 1.3 million articles were downloaded per month
• Over 100 organizations become institutional members of BMC, bringing the total number of members to 462.

For more information on scholarly publishing developments, see the hot topics section of the UAMS Library’s website (www.library.uams.edu/schpub/schpublish.aspx).