An announcement from BioMed Central of possible interest to the readers of
this list. Apologies for cross-posting.

PRESS RELEASE

BioMed Central welcomes the new National Institutes of Health Public Access
policy

London, 4 February 2005

BioMed Central welcomes the announcement of the US National Institutes of
Health (NIH) new public access policy. The NIH calls on all of its grantees
to deposit articles resulting from their NIH-funded research in the National
Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and make them freely available within
12 months.

BioMed Central anticipates that many other funding bodies worldwide will now
follow the example set by NIH.

All NIH grantees now have a new factor to take into account when choosing
where they wish to publish their research. To fulfil the NIH request,
authors publishing with most of the traditional subscription publishers will
be expected to go through a process of resubmitting their papers to the
PubMed Central repository. In addition, they will often need to update their
manuscript version with the changes introduced in the publication process,
as many publishers specify that only the author's version of the manuscript
can be submitted to archives.

Those who choose to publish in any of BioMed Central's Open Access journals,
which cover all areas of biology and medicine, are assured that the
published version of their paper will be placed in PubMed Central for them,
immediately and without any need for additional work from them. Researchers
are thus saved the time and effort of going through the deposition process
themselves.

This significant benefit is in addition to the rapid and high quality peer
review, fast publication and high visibility of BioMed Central's Open Access
journals.

BioMed Central urges all researchers in the life and medical sciences to
fulfil the NIH request and to submit their future manuscripts to one of the
130 Open Access journals published by BioMed Central.

The NIH announcement can be found in full at:
[http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm]

###

Press Office Contacts:
Grace Baynes for BioMed Central
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7631 9988
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent online
publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to
the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This
commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to
the rapid and efficient communication of science. In addition to open-access
original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews and other
subscription-based content.
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