Mandated OA for publicly-funded medical research in the US Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate yesterday that would mandate OA to publicly-funded medical research within four months of its publication. Officially titled the American Center for Cures Act of 2005, the bill is informally known as the CURES Act. It would create a new agency within the NIH, the American Center for Cures (ACC), whose primary mission would be to translate fundamental research into therapies. The bill is very large and covers a lot of territory, but for our purposes the critical part is Section 499H. Like the existing NIH policy, the CURES Act would apply only to the author's final peer-reviewed manuscript, although copyright holders would have the option to replace it with the final published text. Public access would be provided by PubMed Central. The bill goes beyond the NIH policy in several important ways. It requires free online access and does not merely request it. It shortens the permissible delay to four months. It extends the OA policy beyond the NIH to research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research. Finally, it explicitly says that non-compliance may be a ground for the funding agency to refuse future funding. The bill is co-sponsored by Thad Cochran (R-MS). See the summary of the bill (discussing all its important provisions except the OA mandate), the section-by-section breakdown (the OA mandate is in Section 499H), and some quotations from supporters. (PS: This is a major step. It would effectively mandate OA to all medical research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, making it more effective and wider in scope than the NIH public-access policy. More later, I promise.) Update. First a correction. The bill was introduced December 7, not December 8. Now some more links: * Press release from Senator Lieberman's office * Press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Excerpt: “The Cures Bill is exactly the medicine that’s needed,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and a leader of the ATA. “It goes right to the heart of the case for unfettered access to publicly funded research. Senators Lieberman and Cochran took a close look at how best to speed development of treatments for diseases. Among their conclusions is that it’s time we ensure the research we’re already conducting is available to all potential users.” Pat Furlong, executive director of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy and an ATA member, was also pleased with the bill. “It recognizes how important the sharing of information is to speeding research and translating new knowledge into cures,” said Furlong. “In the age of the Internet, it makes no sense for the results of taxpayer-funded research to be hidden away.”