[Ip-health] NIH Public Access Policy

[Sean Flynn]

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http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html
<http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html>

NIH Announces Public-Access Policy
By Jocelyn Kaiser
Science.com
Jan. 11, 2008

Starting in April, most U.S. biomedical scientists will have to send
copies of their accepted, peer-reviewed manuscripts to the U.S. National
Institutes of Health (NIH) for posting in a free archive. If they don't,
they could have trouble renewing their grants or even lose research
funding.

That's the gist of NIH's announcement today describing how it will carry
out a new "public access" mandate. The directive, touted as a way to
disseminate results of taxpayer-funded research, was part of an NIH
spending law passed by Congress in December. It makes mandatory a policy
in effect since May 2005 that requests that NIH-funded investigators
submit accepted manuscripts to NIH, which posts the full text in its
free PubMed Central archive no more than 12 months after the article is
published in a journal. Most grantees have ignored the request: Of
roughly 65,000 eligible articles per year, only about 12% are being
submitted by authors, says David Lipman of NIH's National Library of
Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

NIH's brief notice on its grants Web site simply says that its existing
public-access policy is now mandatory for all articles accepted on or
after 7 April. Making sure that submissions comply with the journals'
copyright policy is up to investigators and their institutions. The
policy applies only to peer-reviewed research and reviews, not
editorials or book chapters, NIH says.

To motivate scientists, NIH will require that investigators include the
PubMed Central or NIH submission number for all applicable papers
referenced in their grant applications and progress reports. Other
possible ways of enforcing the policy include a call from an NIH program
director and suspension of funds, says NIH Deputy Director for
Extramural Research Norka Ruiz Bravo. "We hope we're not going to get
there," she says.

The public-access policy has long been controversial. Some researchers
and publishers worry about confusion resulting from having two versions
of the article online: the PubMed Central author manuscript, which
hasn't been copyedited, and the published paper. Many publishers also
fret that making articles free will cut into subscription income needed
to run journals and fund society activities. The Association of American
Publishers has warned that a mandatory policy "undermines" publishers'
copyright and is "inconsistent with" U.S. laws (Science, 11 January, p.
145). The association also says that the rule limits academic freedom by
preventing researchers from publishing in journals that don't comply.

But most major biomedical research journals (including Science) already
allow authors to submit manuscripts to PubMed Central, so the mandatory
policy won't mean a big change. However, says Martin Frank, executive
director of the American Physiological Society, journals will have to
step up their policing by asking NIH to remove articles that have been
mistakenly posted because they are still under embargo or are too old to
fall under the policy.