BioMed Central anticipates that many other funding bodies worldwide will now follow the example set by NIH.
All NIH grantees now have a new factor to take into account when choosing where they wish to publish their research. To fulfil the NIH request, authors publishing with most of the traditional subscription publishers will be expected to go through a process of resubmitting their papers to the PubMed Central repository. In addition, they will often need to update their manuscript version with the changes introduced in the publication process, as many publishers specify that only the author's version of the manuscript can be submitted to archives.
Those who choose to publish in any of BioMed Central's Open Access journals, which cover all areas of biology and medicine, are assured that the published version of their paper will be placed in PubMed Central for them, immediately and without any need for additional work from them. Researchers are thus saved the time and effort of going through the deposition process themselves.
This significant benefit is in addition to the rapid and high quality peer review, fast publication and high visibility of BioMed Central's Open Access journals.
BioMed Central urges all researchers in the life and medical sciences to fulfil the NIH request and to submit their future manuscripts to one of the 130 Open Access journals published by BioMed Central.
The NIH announcement can be found in full at: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm