RE: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate & Govt Repositories

["Klein, Bonnie CIV DTIC O" <BKlein@dtic.mil>]

1) Re: Ann's note.  You are correct that often the documented 
results of government funded research winds up in filing 
cabinets, doomed as gray literature and to extinction.  However, 
some government agencies do have the infrastructure and do 
support public websites where they make available reports 
resulting from contracts or grants.  These repositories, however, 
face the same issues of repositories everywhere -- getting the 
producing and sponsoring organizations to contribute their 
documents.

An example of a government repository is DoD's Defense Technical 
Information Center(DTIC).  Searching the Technical Reports 
database http://stinet.dtic.mil/str/guided-tr.html for Corporate 
Author "Yale" matched 2134 out of 981113 citations.  Of those, 
418 are full-text.  The latest accession is ADA471819 (Full Text 
Handle http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA471819 )  Title: A Fast 
Randomized Algorithm for the Approximation of Matrices Corporate 
Author: YALE UNIV NEW HAVEN CT DEPT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE Report 
Date: 31 JUL 2007.  If you do a Google search of the document 
title, Yale's copy is the first hit and DTIC is second.  Also see 
DOE's GrayLit Network:  http://www.osti.gov/graylit/ and 
www.science.gov .

2) For history on the NIH Public Access Policy, see Peter Suber's 
SPARC Newsletters: 
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-05.htm#nih. 
In 2005 NLM bowed to publisher concerns in crafting the voluntary 
deposit within 12 months policy.  The House Appropriations 
Subcommittee favored mandatory deposit within 6 months of 
publication. Because they doubted that the NIH concessions would 
yield the desired results, the Subcommittee required NIH to 
measure and report on the program's success.  The Subcommittee 
was right; see 
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/Final_Report_20060201.pdf

Bonnie Klein
Technical Reports Team
Defense Technical Information Center