| April 25, 2005 |
| TO: |
Faculty |
| FROM: |
R. Michael Tanner
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
|
| |
Eric Gislason, Vice Chancellor for Research |
| |
Mary M. Case, University Librarian |
| RE: |
NIH Public Access Policy |
A new Public Access Policy from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requests
grant recipients deposit copies of their final manuscripts in PubMed Central
beginning May 2, 2005. We strongly encourage UIC researchers with NIH grants
to comply with this request.
The NIH has established this policy to monitor and archive the output of the
research it funds. More importantly, NIH understands that the return on its
investment is greatly enhanced by the ready availability of research results
to health care providers, educators, scientists and the public in a single,
permanent, open-access archive. The current commercial publishing system does
not support this broad availability. In fact, this system often disenfranchises
researchers and practitioners who are not affiliated with major research institutions
that can afford to subscribe to a broad range of increasingly expensive scientific
journals.
UIC receives extensive NIH funding for research: in FY2003, UIC received $132.1
million dollars in NIH funding, and, for 2005, NIH lists 487 UIC Principal
Investigators on NIH grants. It is important to UIC and its individual researchers
that the results of research are visible, valued, and used. We believe that
depositing your work in PubMed Central as soon as possible after publication
is an important step in achieving this goal.
To answer questions that faculty may have about the new NIH policy, the Library
has created a website and discussion list where information will be posted
and concerns addressed. Details are included in the attached announcement developed
by the Library’s Scholarly Communication Task Force. In addition, once
procedures are established by NIH, the Library intends to set up a service
to provide support to interested Principal Investigators in depositing their
works.
We hope you will take the time to review the attached information and explore
how you can make your research more widely available when you publish your
next paper.
