POLICY CHANGES IN BUDGET BILL

Abstract

WHEN PRESIDENT George W. Bush signed the huge 2008 omnibus federal spending bill late last month, it included several non-budget-related provisions that will impact the chemical enterprise. The last-minute appropriations measure gave members of Congress the opportunity to insert many unrelated measures into the law, including chemical plant security rules, restrictions on chemical fertilizers, and mandatory access to NIH research results. The open-access provision orders NIH to provide the public with online access to published research that was supported by NIH. This means that all NIH-funded investigators will be required to deposit electronic copies of resulting peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central—NIH’s online, publicly accessible journal archive—for posting no later than 12 months after publication. NIH’s current policy calls for voluntary submission of manuscripts. Journal publishers, including the American Chemical Society (which publishes C&EN), have expressed reservations about the mandato...