January 13, 2006

Elias Zerhouni, M.D.
Director
National Institutes of Health
9000 Rockville Pike
Bethesda , MD 20892

Dear Dr. Zerhouni:

We are writing to let you know that, effective January 2006, the journals of the American Association of Anatomists (AAA) allow free online access to content 12 months after publication. Thus, the January 2005 issues of both journals— The Anatomical Record and Developmental Dynamics —are now available at their respective websites (see below).

At first blush, this news might not seem particularly remarkable. After all, as you know, nonprofit publishers have been publishing scientific research online since 1995 and making the results available to the public at no charge since 2000. According to the DC Principles Coalition,the public has access to more than 1,000,000 free articles from more than 800 journals through the HighWire portal alone, with some 10,000 new articles added every month.

What is remarkable, however, is that, while AAA is a nonprofit society, our journals are published and copyrighted by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. In the spirit of NIH's new public access policy, Wiley has agreed that the full text of all AAA journal articles—regardless of funding source—be freely available one year after publication.

In addition, for all of its journals, Wiley assumes the responsibility and administrative burden of submitting accepted manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC) on behalf of all authors who are NIH grantees. We must note, however, that this task would be greatly simplified—and overall compliance with the NIH policy greatly improved—if PMC offered a user-friendly process for bulk submission of manuscripts by publishers. (It would be even better, of course, if NIH would provide public access through its existing system of links from abstracts already indexed in the Medline/PubMed database.)

AAA's Public Affairs Committee and Board of Directors have worked extensively with Wiley over the past year to achieve this unique level of access for our commercially published journals.

AAA will continue to work with FASEB and the DC Principles Coalition to ensure that the NIH policy remains voluntary.

Sincerely,

Kathy Svoboda , Ph.D. Andrea Pendleton
President, American Association of Anatomists Executive Director
Professor, Baylor College of Dentistry

cc: Kurt Albertine, editor-in-chief, The Anatomical Record : www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/28243
Gary Schoenwolf, editor-in-chief, Developmental Dynamics : www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/38417