As reported by Jennifer McLennan (Association of Research Libraries) on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list: 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent.

Papers published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine , for which an author-pays fee has been paid, are now flowing directly in PMC. These papers should be mirrored to UKPMC within the next 24 hours.

The American Thoracic Society – publishers of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine , the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology and the Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society – have modified their Open Access policy such that it is now fully compliant with the open access grant conditions developed by the UKPMC Funders.

The British Library – who, in collaboration with MIMAS, and EBI are responsible for managing the UKPMC service on behalf of the UKPMC Funders Group – have been busy over the last few weeks running workshops and other events to begin the task of alerting the life sciences research community (and soliciting their input) to the developments which will come online at UKPMC over the next nine months.

Authors publishing research in European Journal of Human Genetics (EJHG) can now opt to make their articles open access. Read the full press release from Nature Publishing Group.

The Company of Biologists (COB) – publishers of Development and Journal of Cell Science – has announced a new policy in which papers published by researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust or the Medical Research Council will be automatically deposited in PMC (and mirrored to UKPMC). The Company of Biologists will deposit the final version of all Wellcome Trust / MRC funded articles, and make these available within 6-months of publication.

UK PubMed Central(UKPMC) is the the UK’s online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed research publications in the life sciences.