[Insight-users] NIH Proposes 6-Month Public Access to Papers

[Luis Ibanez]

Science, Vol 305, Issue 5690, 1548 , 10 September 2004
NIH Proposes 6-Month Public Access to Papers
Jocelyn Kaiser

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released a draft policy
aimed at increasing public access to the results of NIH-funded research.
The proposal issued 3 September in the NIH Guide* would require grantees
to deposit copies of their papers in NIH's free PubMed Central archive
once they have been accepted by a journal. Manuscripts would be posted
online 6 months after publication.

In July, a congressional spending panel recommended that NIH post
NIH-funded manuscripts within 6 months of publication, or immediately if
NIH grants were used to pay publication costs. The language, part of
NIH's pending 2005 budget, triggered frenzied lobbying on all sides.
Librarians, patient organizations, and scientists who think taxpayers
should have easier access to NIH-funded research urged NIH to follow the
House language. Commercial publishers and many scientific societies
lobbied against a mandatory plan, saying it could bankrupt many journals.

NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, who has held meetings recently with
interested groups, told scientists last week that 6 months was
"reasonable" (Science, 3 September, p. 1386). The draft policy is
similar to the House language: Investigators will submit their final,
peer-reviewed manuscript to PubMed Central. Journals can ask NIH to
replace the manuscript with the published paper, sooner than 6 months if
they wish. NIH plans to take comments for 60 days and will also post the
draft policy in the Federal Register.

"We're strongly behind it," says Richard Johnson of the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. His group "would have
preferred immediate access, but we see this as an important step forward."

Scientific societies had a mixed reaction. Alan Leshner, executive
director of AAAS (which publishes Science), calls the policy "a
reasonable compromise" but says it "could pose significant risk for some
scientific societies." And Martin Frank, executive director of the
American Physiological Society, calls the plan "an unnecessary
expenditure of federal funds for a redundant repository of peer-reviewed
literature." He notes that most journals already provide back articles
for around $5 to $30, or for free after a certain period. Frank also
wonders how PubMed Central will keep track of manuscripts submitted
separately by co-authors of the same paper. "It could be chaos out
there," he warns.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP), which is also worried
about the policy's impact on free markets, plans to take its objections
to senators Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair and
ranking member, respectively, of the Senate appropriations committee for
NIH, which will take up the spending bill once it passes the House. "We
think there are a lot of questions that should be answered," says Allan
Adler, AAP vice president for legal and governmental affairs. However,
last week Specter told The Washington Post that he does not intend to
intervene.