Inhofe Attempts to Undermine Open Access

As you probably know, today the US Senate votes on amendments sponsored by Senator Inhofe (Rep. - OK) which would effectively nullify parts of the the bill (FY08 Labor-HHS Bill) that would require all NIH funded work to be published in a media freely accessible to the public (i.e. Open Access).

Inhofe's amendments are,

Amendment 3416 - Strike this passage from the bill:

The Director of the National Institutes of
Health shall require that all investigators funded by the
NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National
Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic
version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon ac-
ceptance for publication to be made publicly available no
later than 12 months after the official date of publication:
Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access
policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

Amendment 3147 - add to the end of that passage the following line:

and in addition only where allowed by and in accordance with the policies of the publishers who have conducted the peer review and accepted the manuscripts for publication.

Soon we'll know whether the Senate had the guts to kill these two amendments, each of which would eliminate all meaningful OA provisions from the bill.

For more see OA news and Open Reading Frame.

*********** UPDATE [10/23]

It looks like the two amendments weren't brought up in yesterday's session. If this matter concerns you (and it should) contact your Senate representative and urge them to vote against these proposed changes. All you need to do is click here.