Not surprisingly, governments and funding agencies around the world are recognizing that dissemination of research results is part of the research process itself. Many are implementing or exploring policies to facilitate the sharing of information and realize the benefits of digital scholarship.
Not surprisingly, governments and funding agencies around the world are recognizing that dissemination of research results is part of the research process itself. Many are implementing or exploring policies to facilitate the sharing of information and realize the benefits of digital scholarship. For example:
- The Canadian Institutes of Health Research has implemented a Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The policy, which came into effect on January 1, 2008, requires that all CIHR-funded researchers make their journal articles freely available online within six months of publication. [English / Français]
- The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has initiated an Aid to Open Access Research Journals. The program is specifically aimed at providing funding for journals that offer subscription-free access to peer-reviewed scholarship in the social sciences and humanities in Canada. [English / Français]
- The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy now requires that its funded investigators deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central, NIH’s online digital archive, so that they may be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. The new mandate, made US law with the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 on December 26, 2007, takes effect on April 7, 2008. NIH also allows grant funds to be used to pay journal publication fees.
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The European Research Council has released new Guidelines for Open Access. The guidelines require that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.
The policy also mandates “primary data” deposit into the relevant existing databases “as soon as possible” and no later than six months after publication.
- Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest private biomedical research funder, requires grantees to submit an electronic copy of the final manuscripts of their research papers into PubMed Central. It also provides grantholders with additional funding to cover publication fees charged by open access journals.
- The Research Councils UK supports the principle that "knowledge derived from publicly funded research must be made available for public use." Several of its component funding councils have implemented policies asking or requiring their grantees to deposit journal articles and conference proceedings in open online archives when appropriate archives are available and copyright or licensing arrangements permit.
- A 2006 study by the European Commission recommends adoption of policies that “guarantee public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication.”
- The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) expects the research results it funds “to be published and to be made available, where possible, digitally and on the Internet via open access” — either in discipline-specific or institutional open online archives following conventional publication or in a recognized peer-reviewed open access journal.
- A 2004 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) “Declaration on Access To Research Data From Public Funding,” adopted by the US, Canada, and 32 other nations, pledges to work towards the establishment of access regimes for digital research data from public funding in accordance with the objective of openness.