Date: 01 March 2012
The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) recently announced that, from July 2012, they would be requiring researchers to deposit an open access copy of any journal article arising from NHMRC-funded research to an institutional repository within 12 months of the publication date.
The new policy aligns the NHMRC with the practices of other international health and medical research funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health in the US, the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.
The following excerpts are from a summary of the revised policy on the NHMRC website:
The Australian Government makes a major investment in research to support its essential role in improving the wellbeing of our society. To maximise the benefits from research, publications resulting from research activities must be disseminated as broadly as possible to allow access by other researchers and the wider community.
NHMRC therefore requires that any publications arising from an NHMRC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve month period from the date of publication.
The requirement that the full-text must be publicly accessible no later than 12 months after the publication date means that authors should deposit the 'accepted manuscript' version of the paper unless the paper has been published by an Open Access publisher (eg BioMed Central, PLoS, Hindawi etc), in which case the published version of the paper can be used. Further information on the implementation of the policy will be available on the NHMRC website shortly.
For NHMRC-funded researchers at QUT, compliance with this policy will be simple because the University already has a well developed Institutional Repository (QUT ePrints) and the Library provides a range of services to advise and support open access scholarly publishing. This includes assistance with repository deposit issues, copyright advice and financial support for the payment of article processing fees (provided the journal is fully open access).
For more information, contact your Liaison Librarian.
Content sourced from QUT News Web Service.
