The Senate subcommittee that appropriates funds for the NIH has approved an appropriation for fiscal 2006 (Senate Report 109-103). The report includes strong support for the NIH public-access policy:
The Committee has noted that the National Institutes of Health has begun to implement its public access policy which is geared to ensuring that NIH-funded research results are made available as soon as possible to the public, health care providers, educators, and scientists through the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central database. The Committee agrees with the need for, and a goal of, issuing a balanced policy to help promote increased public access to NIH-funded research while maintaining the integrity of the peer review system which is essential to ensure the quality and accuracy of medical research in the United States.
Like the House last month (House Report 109-143), the Senate bill instructs the NIH to report back to Congress next year on the rate at which NIH grantees are complying with the request to provide copies of their research articles for public access.
Comment. Because the House and Senate appropriations reports differ in small ways, the differences will have to be worked out in a conference committee. I'll have more to say about these differences in the August issue of SOAN. Because both bills endorse the goals of the policy, and both ask the NIH to report on the compliance rate, those elements are sure to survive the conference. NIH will get the message that both houses of Congress are concerned that spotty compliance toward a good goal will not suffice. Meager compliance will be a reason to strengthen the policy, for example, by changing the public-access request to a requirement.
Data recently released by NIH indicate that the number of submissions since the policy's implementation in early May is very low. Based on annual data, NIH funding is responsible for about 65,000 scholarly articles a year. Therefore, NIH grantees could have chosen to place approximately 11,000 articles on PubMed Central --making this taxpayer-funded research available free to the public. However, statistics provided by NIH this week show that only three percent of this number, or 340 articles accepted for publication, have been submitted by NIH grantees. Sharon F. Terry, President of the Genetic Alliance and a member of the Public Access Working Group, commented that "If we were a venture capital company investing in a new business, and we saw early performance returns at the rate of three percent, we would not wait to re-examine our strategy."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/16/2005 10:18:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
