American Society of Hematology

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Blood Expands Public Access Policy

By Eleanore Tapscott

2008-05-01

Ms. Tapscott is Director of Publishing at ASH.

Blood maintains a 12-month embargo for current articles, but content older than 12 months is free to all online. In 2006, ASH became a participant in PMC (National Institutes of Health Portfolio) Archive Program, an initiative providing a new option to comply with the NIH policy on enhanced access. All Blood authors who published NIH-funded articles from May 2005 forward have no obligation to submit manuscripts to the NIH archive because Blood will do this on their behalf.

This option is the result of efforts by ASH and a group of nonprofit publishers to improve compliance with the current NIH public access policy while maintaining the publisher-mandated access embargoes. The program provides NIH with final articles representing NIH-funded research for use in an internal archive at NIH. After the publication embargo, the article is publicly available in PMC and on the Blood Web site. In view of the recently passed legislation mandating deposit of NIH-funded research into PMC within 12 months of publication, ASH wants its authors to know that no further action is required on their part and that ASH will continue, as it has done since 2006, to deposit the final print version of the manuscript into PMC. The NIH believes the NIH Portfolio Archive Program complies with the new legislative mandate and is advantageous to authors.

Additionally, to facilitate author compliance with the public access requirements of Wellcome Trust or the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, ASH implemented a public access policy in which papers funded by Wellcome Trust or Howard Hughes Medical Institute would be deposited into PMC after payment of an open-access fee of $2,000, in addition to the regular publication fees charged to authors. In December 2007, ASH agreed to extend this option to any author, for the same open-access fee of $2,000. Upon payment of the fee, Blood will deposit the article into PMC and ensure immediate, free access on the Blood Web site.

Information about Blood's public access policy is available on the Blood Web site and in the journal's “Information for Authors” section. Questions may also be sent to editorial@hematology.org.