Researchers with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) soon will be required to put copies of peer-reviewed publications in an online repository, where they will eventually be made open to the public. In the future, researchers reporting on grants or applying for new funding from NIH will be required to show that they have complied with the depositing requirement.

The new NIH policy stems from a Congressional mandate that a digital copy of any peer-reviewed journal article resulting from NIH funding and submitted for publication after April 7 be deposited in PubMed Central, an online repository maintained by NIH. PubMed Central will make the article available to the public either immediately or within a year after publication, depending on journal publishers' guidelines. While many journals already allow open access, some never allow their contents to go public. Researchers will either have to negotiate new terms with such journals or publish with journals that are willing to comply.

The NIH estimates that about 80,000 articles a year are published based on NIH funding. According to John Saylor, associate university librarian for scholarly communications and collections, 199 researchers on the Ithaca campus have NIH funding and about the same number at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Cornell University Library is gearing up to help members of the Cornell community comply with the new requirement with a series of informational sessions, a Web site at http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/nihmandate.html and an e-mail hotline at nihmandate@cornell.edu. Saylor and other library experts will answer researchers' e-mail questions.

The information sessions -- at 4 p.m., March 17 and 20, in Stone Classroom in Mann Library, and April 2 in the Engineering Library Blue Room in Carpenter Hall -- will explain how to deposit articles and what researchers need to know about copyright ownership to comply with the new requirement. For example, authors must be careful to secure the rights to deposit in the NIH repository when they sign a copyright transfer agreement with a publisher.

Saylor said the sessions also will show that the new policy enhances access to biomedical literature.

"Free access ... will maximize the visibility of your research and ensure that researchers and students around the world will be able to read and build on your work," the library says on its Web site. It adds, "Preliminary research suggests that articles that are freely available are cited more often and have a greater impact."

The library's monthly Research Administration Round Table session, April 8 from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. in G10 Biotech, will be devoted to a discussion of the issues raised by the new policy with a panel conisting of Saylo, Katherine Chiang, public services librarian at Mann Library and Peter B. Hirtle, Cornell Library intellectual property officer.

Currently more than 300 biomedical journals automatically submit their articles to PubMed, and researchers publishing in those journals will not need to do anything new. Some other journals submit articles at the author's request. In some cases authors will have to submit the articles themselves, and the library is prepared to walk them through the process if necessary.

The goal of the policy, according to proponents, is to advance public health by making research results rapidly available to all, not merely to those who can afford to subscribe to expensive journals. Meanwhile the Association of American Publishers (AAP) claims the policy will have a "negative impact on science publishing" and is inconsistent with intellectual property law. AAP is lobbying Congress to overrule the change.