Progress toward Public Access to Science 英文参考文献.docVIP

Editorial Progress toward Public Access to Science Harold Varmus T he National Institutes of Health (NIH) is about to cross an important threshold. Starting in traditional, subscription-based journals, there is normally a six- to 12- month interval between publication and posting for public access. For that reason, the libraries are inherently archival—they are useful for searching relatively recent papers, but not for browsing most of the world’s newly published work. Furthermore, not every important new article will have been supported by enlightened funding agencies and fall within the reach of their mandates; those may not appear in PMC at all. The libraries are also limited as archives—the new policy is not retroactive, and few of the journals that participate in PMC have contributed their older papers. This is a pity, given the potential for preserving our scienti?c legacy in a searchable, digital form, especially at a time when most academic libraries are placing their old paper volumes in distant warehouses. So, for various reasons, the public libraries will remain incomplete, even with respect to recent work, until all authors—and publishers—commit to ensuring access to their work. readers. Thus the distribution and reuse of open-access content can be without limit, just as scientists and the public would wish. April 7th, the authors of research reports that describe work supported by the NIH will be required to deposit accepted manuscripts into PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH’s public digital library of full-text articles, with the understanding that the articles will be freely available for all to view no later than 12 months after publication. This is a landmark event from The issue of ownership of published scienti?c papers is a vexing one, and it could pose dif?culties for another recent and exciting initiative that promises to enlarge access to scholarly work. Last month, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted unanimously to require that i