NIH Public Access Policy Has Little Effect Thus Far
It has only been a few months since the National Institutes of Health implemented its public access policy, but the response from authors thus far has been dismal. According to a report from the NIH last week, only 340 articles have been submitted to PubMed Central since the policy’s implementation. In a statement, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), said that figure amounts to just three percent of eligible articles. NIH funding is responsible for about 65,000 scholarly articles annually, according to SPARC, which means that NIH grantees could have chosen to place approximately 11,000 articles on PubMed Central since the policy went into effect on May 2. In February, the NIH released its final policy which called for voluntary submission of NIH-funded research within one year of publication–a sharp retreat from its original draft policy that would’ve required submission within six months of publication.
While supporters of the NIH’s public access efforts originally lauded the potential message of the new policy–that taxpayers deserved access to the research they fund–critics said that the final policy would be ineffective at best, and possibly detrimental, creating a de facto one year embargo on research. In a statement and in a videotaped message delivered at the Association of College and Research Libraries meeting in April, NIH director Elias Zerhouni said that he expected that "only in limited cases will authors deem it necessary to select the longest delay period." So far, that prediction appears to be off-target, although, it should be noted, outreach efforts to NIH grantees are just beginning. Toward that end, the U.S. Senate last week, in conjunction with the FY 2006 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations bill, requested that the NIH report submission statistics by February of next year, including the total number of applicable works submitted since the policy took effect, as well as the embargo period selected by each submitting author.
However, Sharon Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance and a member of the Public Access Working Group–main supporters along with SPARC of the NIH’s original policy–suggested that the early returns were enough to evaluate the shortcomings of the NIH’s scaled-back policy. "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," she said in a statement.
Library Journal Academic Newswire, July 19, 2005
