NIH invites comment: in Chronicle of Higher Education

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Copyright 2004 by the Chronicle of Higher Education
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Tuesday, September 7, 2004

NIH Invites Comment on Proposal Requiring Free Online Access to Research
It Supports
By JULIANNE BASINGER

The National Institutes of Health released a draft proposal late Friday
that would require researchers who receive NIH grants to provide the
agency with electronic copies of final reports on their study results,
which would be posted online in a federal digital archive that is free to
all.

According to the proposal, researchers whose work is supported in whole or
in part by NIH funds would need to make the final drafts of their reports
available upon acceptance for publication. Within six months of a research
study's publication -- or sooner if the publisher agreed -- the NIH would
post the information on PubMed Central, a digital archive maintained by
the National Library of Medicine.

The NIH would monitor the submission of the manuscripts as part of its
annual review of grants.

Public comments on the proposal will be accepted until November 3. The
agency's action follows a recommendation last July by the Appropriations
Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, which urged the NIH to
provide the public with free online access to articles resulting from
research financed by the agency's grants and contracts (The Chronicle,
July 19).

"NIH's mission includes a longstanding commitment to share and support
public access to the results and accomplishments of the activities that it
funds," the agency wrote in the notice for the proposal. "The NIH must
balance this need with the ability of journals and publishers to preserve
their critical role in the peer-review, editing, and scientific
quality-control process."

But scientific publishers have complained about having a publishing model
forced upon them. Since the House committee's recommendation in July, they
have lobbied Elias A. Zerhouni, the NIH's director, arguing that an
open-access model would threaten publishers' ability to decide when and
whether to make articles free (The Chronicle, September 1). They have also
argued that such a model would cost them subscribers. That would cause
professional societies and patient-advocacy groups to lose a major source
of funds, the publishers said.

Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society,
said on Monday that the NIH proposal is "not acceptable." Most scientific
journals already post articles on the Web, he said, and allow
nonsubscribers to read them for a fee that can range from $5 to $30. Even
so, he said, reposting the articles on PubMed Central "is an unnecessary
expenditure of federal funds for a Web site that is redundant."

But supporters of the proposal said the NIH had made a concession to
publishers by allowing the six-month delay between a study's publication
and its posting on PubMed Central. "People who need it right away will
have to be subscribers" to the scientific journals, said Peter Suber, a
research professor of philosophy at Earlham College who is directing an
open-access drive for a group called Public Knowledge. "It would be more
in the public interest to provide immediate open access."

Even so, he called the NIH proposal "a very big step forward" in making
study results available to a wide array of researchers, physicians, and
patients who otherwise might not have access to the information because
they cannot afford expensive subscriptions to scientific journals.

Comments on the NIH proposal may be submitted on an NIH Web site at:

http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/public_access/add.htm
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