In February 2005, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new policy designed to accelerate the public's access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The policy, the first of its kind for NIH, calls on scientists to allow NIH to release to the public manuscripts from research supported by NIH as soon as possible, and within 12 months of final publication. These peer-reviewed, NIH-funded research publications will be available in a Web-based archive to be managed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of NIH. The online archive is designed to increase the public's access to health-related publications at a time when demand for such information is on a steady rise.
"With the rapid growth in the public's use of the internet, NIH must take a leadership role in making available to the public the research that we support," said NIH Director, Dr Elias A Zerhouni. "While this new policy is voluntary, we are strongly encouraging all NIH-supported researchers to release their published manuscripts as soon as possible for the benefit of the public. Scientists have a right to see the results of their work disseminated as quickly and broadly as possible, and NIH is committed to helping our scientists exercise this right. We urge publishers to work closely with authors in implementing this policy."
The NIH policy will achieve several important goals, including:
creating a stable archive of peer-reviewed research publications resulting from NIH-funded studies to ensure the permanent preservation of these vital research findings;
securing a searchable compendium of these research publications that NIH and its awardees can use to manage more efficiently and to understand better their research portfolios, monitor scientific productivity, and, ultimately, help set research priorities; and
making published results of NIH-funded research more readily accessible to the public, health care providers, educators, and scientists.
Beginning 2 May 2005, the policy requests that NIH-funded scientists submit an electronic version of the author's final manuscript, upon acceptance for publication, resulting from research supported in whole or in part by NIH. The author's final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all modifications from the publishing peer review process.
The policy gives authors the flexibility to designate a specific time frame for public release, ranging from immediate public access after final publication to a 12-month delay, when they submit their manuscripts to NIH. Authors are strongly encouraged to exercise their right to specify that their articles will be publicly available through PubMed Central (PMC) as soon as possible. As part of on-going efforts to implement this new policy, NIH plans to establish a Public Access Advisory Working Group, as a subgroup of the NLM's Board of Regents. The Working Group will include representatives of the patient advocacy, scientific, library, and publishing communities, and will provide advice on implementation issues and assess progress in meeting the new policy's stated goals.
"In developing this policy, we made a concerted effort to balance the importance of this archive to NIH's public health mission, with the need to provide flexibility for authors, their institutions, and publishers in those cases where immediate release is not possible," Zerhouni added.
"NIH recognizes the importance of preserving quality peer review and the viability of a diversity of publishing models. Nevertheless, we expect that only in limited cases will authors deem it necessary to select the longest delay period."
In response the Association of American Publishers (APA)/Professional Scholarly Publishing Division (PSP) has stated, that whilst agreeing that science and society at large are best served by the widest possible dissemination of published health and medical research, it must complement rather than compete with or duplicate the significant advancements and substantial investments that publishers have already made.
Publishers make medical research results known by: actively participating in literature retrieval systems that make it possible to search the literature and identify relevant articles; enabling electronic access to their journals via flexible licensing arrangements (including college and university libraries, medical schools, hospitals, and public libraries); endorsing the practice of interlibrary loan; offering free and immediate alerting of published research via their own websites; working with document delivery services; and making full-text articles available on their websites for free either immediately, or within a period of months or a year after the publication date.
The APA/PSP believes the NIH policy will not have the huge benefit of the publisher's additional expertise and investment in complete peer review process, editing, abstracting, indexing, distribution, archiving, searching, access, and innovation. The mission of society programs is the dissemination of sound science and the fear is this policy will threaten the societies' missions by undermining and competing with their highly regarded journals. In effect, this could led to multiple inferior, incorrect, inaccurate, or incomplete versions of what ultimately appears as a final document of record published by the experienced society publisher. The danger posed to science and the public by reliance on or reference to the inferior or retroactively changed versions is seriously problematic, as retroactively updated draft versions cannot meet the high criteria met by the final article in publication.
There is already a trend developing of subscribers being less inclined to subscribe/purchase journals. The fear is the NIH policy will exacerbate this trend, undermining the value and mission of the society publishers, with a greater loss to the public and science.
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