Several news outlets keep misreporting the public access mandate of a congressional funding bill.

As open access blogger Peter Suber posted last week, Nature News, The Washington Post , the blog Slashdot and several others all reported that a provision in the congressional appropriations bill for 2008 would require NIH-funded researchers to publish in open access journals. On November 7, Nature News reported "US investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) may soon be compelled to publish only in journals that make their research papers freely available within one year of publication."

What the bill actually says is that all NIH-funded research must be deposited in PubMed within one year of publication.

There was a push to eliminate or alter this requirement in the bill last month, as I reported here but those amendments did not pass. This bill was vetoed today (November 13) by President Bush for its high spending level, but has been sent back to Capitol Hill for a vote to override the veto.

Suber coined this common error made by media, agencies, and government JAM, or Journal-Archive Mixup. He has been tracking its occurrence for more than three years.