Partnering in science information: Necessities of change

Bernard Dumouchel of the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)3 gave a welcoming address outlining the unique position of ICSTI since its members are a broad church, representing scientific users, publishers, national scientific and technical information (STI) centers, international unions and so on. He thanked CSA4 and the US Geological Survey National Biological Information Infrastructure (USGS NBII)5 for hosting the meeting and NLM for the use of the Lister Hill Auditorium. NERAC6 and the Library of Congress7 also sponsored the meeting. Don Lindberg, Director of NLM, made some opening remarks. There has been a revolution in the way research results are published and shared. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have stated that research that they fund should be made publicly available in PubMed Central8 but so far this has been a request, not a mandate. Lindberg thinks that Congress will mandate it fairly soon. Only 10–15% of currently published papers directly credit NIH research support, and hence would be required to submit full text to PubMedCentral. The Howard Hughes Institute and the Wellcome Foundation have mandated open access to the results of research they fund, as have the Max Planck Institutes, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and others.