NIH Funded Research to be Open Access

[updated September 16, 2008]

*** September 16, 2008 *** Open access to NIH funded research appears to be in danger with bill HR 6845 being introduced to Congress by Congressmen John Conyers of Michigan and Howard Berman of California. This law, if enacted, would overturn the gains that open access has achieved under recently introduced US law (as described in this post below). See [link] for more info on this new threat.

On December 26, 2007 President Bush signed into law mandatory compliance with National Institute of Health's (NIH) public access policy, formerly voluntary only, so it now requires all NIH funded research to be publicly accessible at the National Library of Medicine's free web site Pubmed Central.

SEC. 218. 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.

For more information see Open Access Central. Also the NIH has created a new part of their web site devoted to Open Access here.

Trend Toward Open Access

The trends clearly favor open access with open access papers in medical journals relating to cancer rising from 7.2% to 8.8% of all cancer papers in the year ending July 2008 according to Biomed Central. See this [blog post]. Note that both US Presidential candidates have pledged to double NIH funding (see McCain Obama) and since all NIH funded research is now open access this promises to sharply increase the amount of research that patients have access to.

April 7, 2008 update

The policy goes into effect today! This is very good news for patients wanting access to medical research.

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