Background Information

October 13, 2004

NIH Mission

The mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to uncover new knowledge that will lead to better health for everyone. The sharing of ideas, data, and research findings is encouraged by NIH as a primary mechanism for accomplishing this important public mission.

Public Access

Advanced computing technologies and a networked environment are creating an infrastructure that supports new research capabilities, expands the ability to build upon and connect the work of many scientists, and facilitates exploration of new scientific frontiers. These technological advances are providing new opportunities to enhance access to and archive the scientific literature.

Thus, although direct and indirect costs included in federal grant funds contribute to financing the publication of manuscripts and subscriptions for journal use, and access to such information is being improved by modern technology, the published results of federally funded health research are not readily accessible to everyone.

NIH Efforts

To this end, NIH is proposing a new policy on public access and manuscript archiving which we hope will meet several important goals:

• Creating a stable archive of peer-reviewed research publications to ensure the permanent preservation of these vital research findings.
• Securing for NIH a searchable compendium of peer-reviewed research publications that the agency can use to manage its research portfolio and monitor scientific productivity.
• Giving the public better access to a time-delayed archive of published results of NIH-funded research.

It is NIH’s intent that the policy will preserve the critical role of journals and publishers in peer review, editing, and scientific quality control processes.

As part of on-going efforts to gather input on this issue, the NIH Director, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, held a series of discussion meetings to hear and consider the opinions and concerns of publishers, scientists, patient advocates, scientific associations, and other organizations. All of the meetings were open and were designed to ensure that in-depth discussions of stakeholder issues could occur. Invitations were extended to a broad base of participants to ensure adequate and balanced representation of opinions. In many cases, participants represented more than one stakeholder group, such as scientists who were also editors and reviewers of prestigious scientific journals.

Draft NIH Policy

After listening and carefully considering the views of publishers, patient advocates, scientists, universities, and others, the NIH drafted a proposed NIH Public Access Policy and posted it in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts on September 3, 2004, http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html and in the Federal Register on September 17, 2004, http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/06jun20041800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2004/04-21097.htm.

Public comments on the draft policy are encouraged and will be accepted for 60 days from the date of publication of the policy in the Federal Register, which is until November 16, 2004.

In brief, the NIH public access policy proposal requests investigators to provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding.

Under the proposal, the NIH would archive these manuscripts in NIH’s digital repository for biomedical research, PubMed Central (PMC), which is fully searchable to enhance retrieval.

Six months after an NIH-supported research study’s publication — or sooner if the publisher agrees — the manuscript would be readily accessible to the public through PMC.

Submission of the final manuscript would provide NIH-supported investigators with an alternate means by which they will meet and fulfill the current requirement to provide one copy of each publication in the annual or final progress reports.

The final policy will take into account the input that NIH receives on this issue, and will outline a clear description of the agency’s position and planned actions in the area of public access. Once the final policy is published, NIH will report to Congress on its implementation.

Related Information (non-NIH web sites)

For additional information on public access, please see the web links below:

• Alliance for Taxpayer Access http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/ATA.html

• American Association for the Advancement of Science http://sippi.aaas.org/ipissues/categories/?id=11
• Association of American Universities Statement on NIH Public Access Proposal http://www.aau.edu/issues/NIHPubAccProp.pdf
• BioMed Central: The Open Access Publisher http://www.biomedcentral.com/

• National Academy of Sciences Council Statement http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/s09162004?OpenDocument
• Nature Publishing Group. Web Focus: Access to the Literature Debate http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/

• Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/faq.html
  

• SPARC Open Access Newsletter http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html

• Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science http://www.dcprinciples.org/

• Wellcome Trust commissioned two reports: “An Economic Analysis of Scientific Research Publishing” and “Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing” http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/node5210.html

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