NIH Public Access Policy

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The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008, [1] requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.

Contents

Description

The NIH Public Access Policy applies Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008) which states: [2]

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

The policy was initially implemented by the NIH as a voluntary policy in 2004. [3] [4] In 2008, the policy was made mandatory by law in Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008). [5] Deposit was then mandated on January 11, 2008, effective April 7, 2008. [6] [1]

Applicability

The work must be:

1. Peer reviewed [2]

2. Published or approved for publication by a journal on or after April 7, 2008 [2]

3. "And, arises from:

  • Any direct funding from an NIH grant or cooperative agreement active in Fiscal Year 2008 or beyond, or;
  • Any direct funding from an NIH contract signed on or after April 7, 2008, or;
  • Any direct funding from the NIH Intramural Program, or;
  • An NIH employee" [2]

Compliance

Authors hold copyright in their work, and are responsible for making sure that in any agreement with a publisher they keep the right to give PubMed Central a non-exclusive license to make a copy of the paper available. [7] Journals with agreements with NIH submit final published versions of papers. For other publishers, authors are required to submit papers when they are accepted for publication. [8] The NIH grant holder is responsible for ensuring this. [9] The author, publisher, or institution continues to hold the copyright as usual. [7] The author may choose to include the article in the Open Access Subset by using one of the Creative Commons licenses. [10]

Publishers may require that "public access" be delayed up to 12 months after publication. Only the author's final draft needs to be published, not any contributions made by the publisher. [11] PubMed Central is the designated repository for papers submitted in accordance with the NIH Public Access Policy and for those that fall under similar policies from other funding agencies. [12]

By April 2014, the NIH had increased enforcement of compliance with its Public Access Policy by delaying continuing grant payments for noncompliance. [13]

Public Access Compliance Monitor

The Public Access Compliance Monitor (PACM or "compliance monitor") is a service from the National Library of Medicine that helps users at NIH-funded institutions locate and track the compliance of funded papers with the NIH Public Access Policy at an institutional level. Authorized members of an institution can get a quick snapshot of their institution's compliance rate or help researchers achieve compliance. [14]

PACM provides users with a list of all PubMed citations associated with an institution's NIH funding and classifies the articles according to compliance status (i.e., Compliant, Non-Compliant, In Process). The compliance monitor also provides detailed information about each article including:

Compliance reports can be downloaded from these lists and the data filtered based on an institution's needs.

Response

Peter Suber described the policy as "the first open access mandate for a major public funding agency in the United States; it is also the first one for a public funding agency anywhere in the world that was demanded by the national legislature rather than initiated and adopted independently by the agency." [15]

In the first few years after the policy was introduced, there were two major legislative efforts to reverse it, primarily driven by some publishers' objections. According to Patrick Ross, the director of the Copyright Alliance: "The mere fact that a scientist accepts as part of her funding a federal grant should not enable the federal government to commandeer the resulting research paper and treat it as a public domain work." [16] The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act was a bill sponsored by John Conyers in 2008 and 2009 that sought to reverse the NIH policy. [17] It failed to leave committee either year. [18] In 2011 the Research Works Act was introduced to end the policy. [19] It died after protests from the academic community and science publisher Elsevier's withdrawal of support. [20]

In 2013 a survey of persons receiving NIH funding and therefore subject to the NIH Public Access policy reported that among 94 respondents, 30% had little understanding of the NIH Public Access Policy and all but two of them said that they accepted the default terms of their copyright forms "as is". [21]

See also

Related Research Articles

National Institutes of Health US government medical research agency

The National Institutes of Health is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The majority of NIH facilities are located in Bethesda, Maryland, and other nearby suburbs of the Washington metropolitan area, with other primary facilities in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and smaller satellite facilities located around the United States. The NIH conducts its own scientific research through the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program.

Open access Research publications that are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

American Chemical Society American scientific society

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields. It is one of the world's largest scientific societies by membership. The ACS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code. Its headquarters are located in Washington, D.C., and it has a large concentration of staff in Columbus, Ohio.

PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.

Harold E. Varmus American scientist (born 1939)

Harold Eliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute from 2010 to 2015, a post to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. He was a co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.

MedlinePlus is an online information service produced by the United States National Library of Medicine. The service provides curated consumer health information in English and Spanish with select content in additional languages. The site brings together information from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), other U.S. government agencies, and health-related organizations. There is also a site optimized for display on mobile devices, in both English and Spanish. In 2015, about 400 million people from around the world used MedlinePlus. The service is funded by the NLM and is free to users.

Medical library

A health or medical library is designed to assist physicians, health professionals, students, patients, consumers, medical researchers, and information specialists in finding health and scientific information to improve, update, assess, or evaluate health care. Medical libraries are typically found in hospitals, medical schools, private industry, and in medical or health associations. A typical health or medical library has access to MEDLINE, a range of electronic resources, print and digital journal collections, and print reference books. The influence of open access (OA) and free searching via Google and PubMed has a major impact on the way medical libraries operate.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

Self-archiving Authorial deposit of documents to provide open access

Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.

Index Medicus (IM) is a curated subset of MEDLINE, which is a bibliographic database of life science and biomedical science information, principally scientific journal articles. From 1879 to 2004, Index Medicus was a comprehensive bibliographic index of such articles in the form of a print index or its onscreen equivalent. Medical history experts have said of Index Medicus that it is “America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge.”

Europe PubMed Central is an open-access repository which contains millions of biomedical research works. It was known as UK PubMed Central until 1 November 2012.

Data sharing

Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are considered by many to be part of the scientific method.

ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry of clinical trials. It is run by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health, and is the largest clinical trials database, holding registrations from over 329,000 trials from 209 countries.

<i>Journal of Cell Biology</i> Academic journal

Journal of Cell Biology is an international, peer-reviewed journal owned by The Rockefeller University and published by Rockefeller University Press.

PubMed Central Canada was a Canadian national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature. It operated from 2010 to 2018. It joined Europe PubMed Central as a member of the PubMed Central International network. PMC Canada was a partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, and the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM).

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.

The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act was submitted as a direct response to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy; intending to reverse it.

Research Works Act

The Research Works Act, 102 H.R. 3699, was a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives at the 112th United States Congress on December 16, 2011, by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) and co-sponsored by Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY). The bill contained provisions to prohibit open-access mandates for federally funded research and effectively revert the United States' National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, which requires taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online. If enacted, it would have also severely restricted the sharing of scientific data. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which Issa is the chair. Similar bills were introduced in 2008 and 2009 but have not been enacted since.

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

History of open access

The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.

References

  1. 1 2 National Institutes of Health, "Request for Information: NIH Public Access Policy", available at https://publicaccess.nih.gov/comments.htm. ("NIH implemented the Public Access Policy on January 11, 2008.")
  2. 1 2 3 4 "NIH Public Access Policy Details". National Institutes of Health. 25 March 2016. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  3. ↑ "Enhanced public access to NIH research information" (Notice NOT-OD-04-064, NIH Guide to Grants and Contracts, 3 September 2004).
  4. ↑ Zerhouni, E. A. (2004). "INFORMATION ACCESS: NIH Public Access Policy". Science. 306 (5703): 1895. doi:10.1126/science.1106929. PMC   1808281 . PMID   15591188.
  5. ↑ National Institutes of Health, "Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research", Notice No. NOT-OD-08-033.
  6. ↑ National Institutes of Health, "Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research", Feb. 3, 2005, NIH Notice Number NOT-OD-05-022.
  7. 1 2 "Frequently Asked Questions about the NIH Public Access Policy". National Institutes of Health. 25 March 2014. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  8. ↑ "How Papers Get Into PMC". National Institutes of Health. 7 January 2015. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  9. ↑ "Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright Considerations and Options". The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.
  10. ↑ "Open Access Subset". National Center for Biotechnology Information. 13 January 2014. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  11. ↑ Willinsky, John (18 March 2009). "A (Publishing) House Divided: Scholarly Publishers in Support and Opposition to Public Access to Research". Slaw. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  12. ↑ "NIH Public Access & PMC". National Center for Biotechnology Information. 26 March 2015. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  13. ↑ Van Noorden, Richard (9 April 2014). "Funders punish open-access dodgers". Nature. 508 (7495): 161. Bibcode:2014Natur.508..161V. doi: 10.1038/508161a . PMID   24717489.
  14. ↑ Funk K. (2015). "Public Access Compliance Monitor".
  15. ↑ Suber, Peter (16 April 2008). "An open access mandate for the National Institutes of Health". Open Medicine. 2 (2): e39-41. PMC   3090178 . PMID   21602938.
  16. ↑ "Statement from Copyright Alliance Executive Director Patrick Ross re: Introduction of HR-6845, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act". Copyright Alliance. 10 September 2008. Archived from the original on 12 October 2008.
  17. ↑ Suber, Peter (October 2008). "A bill to overturn the NIH policy". SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
  18. ↑ "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (2009; 111th Congress H.R. 801)". govtrack.us.
  19. ↑ Sporkin, Andi (December 23, 2011). "Publishers Applaud "Research Works Act," Bipartisan Legislation To End Government Mandates on Private-Sector Scholarly Publishing". Association of American Publishers. Archived from the original on January 8, 2012. Retrieved January 9, 2017.
  20. ↑ Howard, Jennifer (27 February 2012). "Legislation to Bar Public-Access Requirement on Federal Research Is Dead". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 28 February 2012.
  21. ↑ Charbonneau, D. H.; McGlone, J. (2013). "Faculty experiences with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy, compliance issues, and copyright practices". Journal of the Medical Library Association. 101 (1): 21–25. doi:10.3163/1536-5050.101.1.004. PMC   3543125 . PMID   23405043.

Further reading

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