…the National Institutes of Health has established a policy mandating open access to the full text of research results from projects it funds. Conservative estimates have placed at least a quarter of the quality medical research done in the world as funded by NIH grants and contracts.

All the material will end up deposited at PubMed Central….

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)

Wow. Eventually, PubMed Central could become the default place to find medical information for most of the world as PubMed became the premier citation database for the health sciences. Working in a health sciences library, the majority of the information our patrons look for come from NIH grants. 

One of the arguments that keeps coming up against OA is that the authors have to pay to have their work published. However, my library and I believe many others buy “institutional memberships” to certain repositories that then allow their work to be included at no cost to them. It would also be strange if publication fees weren’t considered legitamate expenses of the grant itself.