ACTIONS
YOU CAN TAKE:

1) THANK your senators and representatives for their support of the NIH policy in 2007.

Contact information and talking points are available here.

2) Add this image to your Web site and show your support for taxpayer access to federally funded research:

 

Current language

Language signed into law with the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 reads as follows: The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law. What will change? Some publishers have stated that the proposal for NIH research is a threat to the revenue they receive from their subscription-supported journals. However, ATA believes the approach embodied in the House language provides adequate protection to publishers’ institutional subscriptions, their primary means of recovering publishing costs. Although useful to taxpayers, the material to be deposited in PubMed Central is not the formatted, paginated, copyedited, authoritative version of the article preferred by authors for citation purposes. Moreover, many journals contain proprietary content valued by readers that would not be in PubMed Central. The proposal for PMC would be similar to the function arXiv.org e-print repository serves for the disciplines of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. In operation for more than a decade, arXiv.org has not resulted in harm to the corresponding journal publishing industry.

NIH Public Access Policy
Public Access Plan in Effect to Make NIH-funded Research Available

STATUS:

June 3, 2008

SPARC response to NIH, in response to call for public comment. [PDF] We commend NIH’s extensive efforts to seek input from the full range of stakeholders throughout the public access policy development process. We believe the agency’s overall response to constructive input has been commendable and that a fundamentally workable policy has resulted from the consultative process. We offer these further comments in order to demonstrate the strategic soundness and overall balance of the policy, and to underscore our community’s continued willingness to work with NIH to ensure that the benefits of this policy may be fully realized by all stakeholders...

May 7, 2008

NIH Updates its Public Access Policy FAQ

April 15, 2008

Harold Varmus talks about the NIH policy on NPR's Science Friday
The Nobel Prize winner discusses the new NIH Public Access Policy with host Ira Flatow.

April 7, 2008

Public access begins (The Scientist)

March 28, 2008

NIH Director Zerhouni welcomes comments on public access policy implementation
..."We believe that public access after a reasonable embargo period of up to a year to research funded by NIH will help advance science and improve human health while preserving peer review and the value of scientific publishing," ...

March 20, 2008

The NIH held a meeting on March 20, 2008 to solicit feedback on the NIH Public Access Policy and its implementation. SPARC participated in the meeting, with both SPARC Steering Committee member David Carlson and Executive Director Heather Joseph presenting comments. Text of those comments can be found by clicking the hyperlinks above and a full video of the public meeting can be found here.

March 17, 2008

Alliance response to the NIH call for public comment.

January 11, 2008

NIH Releases Revised Public Access Policy
Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research (National Institutes of Health, January 11, 2008)

December 26, 2007

Public Access Mandate Made Law

October 31, 2007

Please thank your Senator for supporting the NIH policy

October 24, 2007

Mandate for Public Access to NIH-Funded Research Poised to Become Law - Full U.S. Senate Approves Bill Containing Support for Access To Taxpayer-Funded Research

Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the end of the year.

October 19, 2007

(October 20, 2007) (Concluded) Call to action: Tell your Senator to OPPOSE amendments that strike or change the NIH public access provision in the FY08 Labor/HHS appropriations bill

October 17, 2007

Letter to Senate on National Institutes of Health public access policy from Genetic Alliance

September 17, 2007

NetCoalition supports public access to taxpayer-funded research. See letter to Senators Reid and McConnell.

September 11, 2007

Call to action: Contact your Senator with support for public access to NIH-funded research

July 20, 2007

House Backs Taxpayer-Funded Research Access
In what advocates hailed as a major advance for scientific communication, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday approved a measure directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide free public online access to agency-funded research findings within 12 months of their publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

July 13, 2007

NIH Public Access Policy Update: Request for letters to all Representatives and Senators

June 28, 2007

Congressional Panel Favors Access to Publicly Funded Research – Public access to NIH-funded research took a major step forward this week with Senate Appropriations Committee agreement to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that its funded research be made publicly available on the Internet. (Read our announcement for more details).

The full House Appropriations Committee has yet to vote. Express your support today.

June 5, 2007

The NIH Public Access Policy is under consideration by Congress as part of the FY08 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill. Supporters are encouraged to contact their Representatives and Senators as soon as possible to request that the policy be made mandatory. The House and Senate are expected to mark up their versions of the Bill before the end of June.

March 19, 2007

During testimony before the Senate Labor/HHS Subcommittee on Appropriations,, NIH Director Zerhouni responded to a series of questions on the need for public access to NIH-funded research results. The questions were made by Subcommittee Chair Senator Harkin (D-IA). Dr. Zerhouni reiterated the need for publicly funded research to be made available to advance the conduct of science, and strongly asserted that the NIH the voluntary policy was not working. He made clear that the policy should be made mandatory. A video of Dr. Zerhouni's testimony is available through the Committee Web site. (Note that the link launches a Real Media file. The relevant discussion begins at 1:20).

October 3, 2006

NIH Director Zerhouni responded to a letter from SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, indicating that the NIH understood that a voluntary policy was not likely to produce the results needed for the NIH to achieve its goals, and that he was actively considering ways to strengthen the policy.

September 26, 2006

House legislation to provide for a sweeping overhaul of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – the first of its kind in 13 years – includes key report language underscoring Congressional oversight to actively monitor participation rates and overall effectiveness of the NIH's Public Access Policy. The senate will consider the proposed Act in November 2006 or early 2007.

June 2006

In June 2006, The US House of Representatives signaled its strong support for the NIH public access to be made mandatory, including language in the body of the FY07 Labor HHS Appropriations bill directing the NIH to require its grantees to deposit manuscripts into PubMed Central, the NIH’s publicly accessible online repository:

SEC. 220. The Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to the NIH National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central as soon as practicable but no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.

The Senate was silent on this in its FY07 bill; final status will likely be decided in Conference later in 2006.

May 2, 2006

On the first anniversary of the implementation of the NIH Public Access Policy, Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) introduce the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, which would ensure public access within six months of publication to the results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies, including the NIH.

April 2006

On April 10, 2006, the NIH Public Access Working Group concluded for the second time that, in order for the public access policy to achieve its stated goals, it needed to be made mandatory. Additionally, polled once again by Chairman Detre, the Working Group agreed that the embargo period should be reduced from a period of one year to a maximum of six months.

February 2006

The NLM Board of Regents ratified the recommendations of the Public Access Working Group on February 8, 2006, sending a letter to NIH Zerhouni confirming that they agreed that they policy should become mandatory, and the embargo period reduced to 6 months.

Later that month NIH Director Elias Zerhouni delivered a report on the status of the policy as requested by both the US Senate and House of Representatives Labor HHS Appropriations Committees. The report indicated that compliance with the policy fell far short of expectations, with less than 5% of all eligible manuscripts being submitted to the system, and pointed to the recommendations of the Board of Regents as a potential way to strengthen the policy.

November 15, 2005

At the first business meeting of the Public Access Working Group, the committee received initial information on statistics related to researcher compliance with the policy, which was extremely low, under 5%. Chairman Thomas Detre explicitly polled the committee on recommendations to strengthen the policy. The majority indicated they support making the policy mandatory, and reducing the embargo period to six months.

Summer 2005

In report language accompanying the FY06 Labor HHS Appropriations Bill, both the House of Representatives and the Senate expressed support for the need for a NIH public access policy, but also concern that the current, voluntary policy would not be sufficient to achieve the agency’s goals.  Congress requested that the NIH track investigator compliance with the voluntary policy, and to report on progress with policy by March 2006. 

May 2005

The NIH soonafter convened a Public Access Working Group of expert stakeholders - 17 individuals representing researchers, publishers, societies, libraries, and the public - to advise them on the effective implementation of the public access policy.

May 2, 2005

On May 2, the National Institutes of Health launched their public access system designed to make more of the research resulting from their grants available online and free to the public. In a June letter [PDF] addressed to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni described his plans to post on a monthly basis the rate at which NIH-funded researchers are submitting to the public access system and allowing access to their research articles via the NIH's publicly accessible archive. The NIH archive is made available on the World Wide Web at PubMed Central.

BACKGROUND:

The public access system implements a policy announced on February 3, 2005 Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research, as published in their online Guide for Grants and Contracts. It requests scientists who have received NIH funding to deposit their resulting research articles upon acceptance for publication in an NIH electronic archive. The author will also specify when after publication the article can be made available online, preferably within 12 months of acceptance for publication. The material in the archive is then openly available with no charge for the public to access the information.

The final policy represents major changes from an initial NIH proposal published on September 3, 2004, NOT-OD-04-064, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information. The initial proposal would have required that NIH-funded research be made available online, within six months of publication, for no extra charge to the American public. The NIH revised their initial proposal based on input during a public comment period that lasted until November 16, or 60 days following its publication in the Federal Register. The NIH Guide is the official publication for NIH medical and behavioral research grant policies, guidelines and funding opportunities.

NIH-funded scientists would deposit their article manuscripts, as accepted for journal publication and that incorporate any changes resulting from the peer review process, into the publicly accessible PubMed Central. The NIH's National Library of Medicine (NLM) maintains PubMed Central as part of its mission to manage the wealth of information resulting from the taxpayer's investment in medical research. PubMed Central would provide indexing and searching tools to the articles, as well as links to the publisher's version of the article, which is usually enhanced through additional editing.

The NIH proposed this policy in response to urging by a U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee report that recommended NIH “develop a policy...requiring that a complete electronic copy of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be provided to PMC upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication” in a recognized scientific journal. It calls on NIH to report back to the committee by December 1, 2004 on how it intends to implement the policy. More detail is available, including the full text of the committee's proposal.

This congressional report language is heavily influenced by a document prepared by the NLM at the request of the Appropriations subcommittee charged with oversight of the NIH. The document, Access to Biomedical Research Information was delivered in May 2004.

NIH Director Elias Zerhouni met with publishers on July 28, 2004, to discuss the PubMed Central proposal coming out of the Appropriations Committee. Additional meetings took place with public interest groups and scientists in late August.

SPARC Director Rick Johnson took the opportunity to submit a letter to Dr. Zerhouni expressing SPARC's support for the proposal that emerged from the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

Also check ATA's media page for news on recent developments.