Open Access News

Raynard Kington, Analysis of Comments and Implementation of the NIH Public Access Policy, Federal Register, February 18, 2009.  Kington is the Acting Director of the NIH.  This document is the official version of a document released by the NIH last September.  Excerpt:

...The current Public Access Policy is the culmination of years of effort and community interaction. Prior to passage of Section 218, the NIH undertook extraordinary public outreach concerning the issue of public access to the published results of NIH-funded research. These outreach efforts included a review of over six thousand public comments and the establishment of an independent advisory group to review NIH's implementation of a voluntary Public Access Policy. Additionally, as part of the process to implement Section 218 in a transparent and participatory manner, the NIH formally sought public input through an open meeting and a Request for Information (RFI) seeking public comment. This open meeting occurred on March 20, 2008, and was designed to ensure that a discussion of stakeholder issues could occur. The feedback from the open meeting helped define questions for an RFI, which was published on the NIH Web site on March 28, 2008 and in the Federal Register on March 31, 2008 (73 FR 16881-16895). The RFI was designed to seek input on the NIH Public Access Policy, as it was revised to incorporate Section 218, and the responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs) concerning it. The RFI was open for sixty days following publication in the Federal Register, from March 28 to May 31, 2008.

In response to the open meeting and RFI, the NIH received 613 unduplicated comments from a broad cross-section of the public, including NIH-funded investigators, members of the general public, patient advocates, professional organizations, and publishers. This report summarizes these comments....

[NIH] efforts [to improve compliance] appear to be working. The NIH estimates approximately 80,000 papers arise from NIH funds each year, and this total serves as the target for the Public Access Policy. During the voluntary policy, from May 2005 to December 2007, the NIH was able to collect a total of 19 percent of targeted papers, from all sources. Under the first five months of the Section 218 requirement (April to August 2008), this rate jumped to an estimated 56 percent of papers per month....

The most common theme among comments, expressed in a large majority of all comments, was support for the Policy as written. When reasons for support were offered, the most common were as follows: (1) The perceived benefit to patients and their families, (2) the belief that the American public has a right to access papers arising from NIH funds, and (3) the expected potential of the policy to advance scientific discovery. A small minority of comments expressed general disagreement with the Policy and/or felt that increasing access to papers arising from NIH funds was unnecessary....

The second largest number of comments, second only to general support for the Policy, were comments advocating reducing the period of time before papers are made publicly available on PubMed Central. A large number of commenters argued for a shorter maximum delay period-- many suggested 6 months, many no delay period at all, and a few suggested 3 months....

A few comments expressed concern that some journals would refuse to allow manuscripts to be posted to PMC in accordance with the Policy, and authors would not be able to publish in those journals....The NIH agrees that author choice of publication is a very important issue, but if [a publisher would not allow public access on the NIH's terms] an author might have to find an alternate journal. Therefore, the NIH encourages authors to clearly communicate with and address these issues before they may transfer their copyright and potentially lose their ability to comply with the Policy....Whether because of NIH's direct efforts, clear communication from authors and institutions or because of publisher support for the Policy, NIH did not receive comments indicating that publishers or publishing agreements have actually prevented authors from complying with the Policy. To the best of our knowledge, this concern currently remains a hypothetical risk and not a manifest problem....

As a way to relieve compliance burdens on their faculty, a few institutions requested direct feeds from their repositories to PubMed Central or the NIH Manuscript Submission system.  The NIH believes that these are worthwhile suggestions, but it is concerned that they raise important technical and logistical challenges regarding author approval, copyright permissions, quality control, and formats for electronic transfer. The NIH remains open to closer collaboration with institutional archives and will consider this issue as the Policy matures. National Library of Medicine representatives met with representatives from academic communities to discuss this issue in November 2008....

As described in FAQ F10, released September 2008, the NIH is not aware that there will be a substantial impact of the policy on Publishers. An increasing number of journals already provide the public with free access to the published article immediately or within one year of the publication.  The NIH Public Access Policy does not affect authors' freedom to choose the vehicle or venue for publishing their results....The NIH has posted thousands of papers to PubMed Central under the NIH Public Access Policy without evidence of harm to scientific publishing or to journals. Only a portion of articles published in scientific journals result from research funded by the NIH. Of these articles, only the final peer-reviewed manuscript is required to be posted, and it need not be made publicly available for up to 12 months post publication. Further, the NIH continues its practice of allowing publication costs, including author fees, to be reimbursed from NIH awards (see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#e3 for more information)....

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