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The September 6, 2004 edition of The Washington Post reports that the National Institute of Health (NIH) is accepting public comments over the next 60 days regarding the proposal to make all results from NIH-funded (i.e. taxpayer-funded) medical researches available online for free. Currently, patients and their family members seeking latest research about the condition they are dealing with would have to pay large fees to download published research papers, including those researches they participated--and that is if they are available for download in the first place.
The issue surfaced in the U.S. House Appropriations Committee this past July, whose recommendations for the FY2005 budget for the NIH included the following language: "The Committee is very concerned that there is insufficient public access to reports and data resulting from NIH-funded research. This situation, which has been exacerbated by the dramatic rise in scientific journal subscription prices, is contrary to the best interests of the U.S. taxpayers who paid for this research. The Committee is aware of a proposal to make the complete text of articles and supplemental materials generated by NIH-funded research available on PubMed Central (PMC), the digital library maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The Committee supports this proposal and recommends that NIH develop a policy, to apply from FY 2005 forward, requiring that a complete electronic copy of any manuscript reporting work supported by NIH grants or contracts be provided to PMC upon acceptance of the manuscript for publication in any scientific journal listed in the NLM's PubMed directory. [...] NIH is instructed to submit a report to the Committee by December 1, 2004 about how it intends to implement this policy, including how it will ensure the reservation of rights by the NIH grantee, if required, to permit placement of the article in PMC and to allow appropriate public uses of this literature."
As patient advocate organization, we believe that publicly funded researches belong to everyone, not just those who conduct them, and especially to those who will most benefit from learning the findings: patients and their family members and friends. We search the PubMed Central database daily for new research papers that are of interest to intersex individuals and our families so we can publicize important findings, but often we find it hard to get our hands on them (yes, some of our members work at medical schools, but even their libraries don't carry everything). We support the work of Open Access Working Group which is promoting open and public access to the scientific and scholarly knowledge and the plan to require all NIH-funded researches to be "open."
Opponents (sadly headed by the highly respected former Congresswoman and a fellow Portland, Oregon native Pat Schroeder, who currently heads the Association of American Publishers--hey Colorado, send her back to the Congress okay?) worry that the move--especially if other funders follow suit--would bankrupt medical journals and the professional medical societies that publish them. But the simple idea that papers based on taxpayer-funded researches should be free to taxpayers makes imminent sense, as does the idea of making them available on PubMed, which is what everyone uses to locate papers in the first place. Regardless, the business model of scientific journals--which is that they charge enormous fees for researchers to publish their papers, and then charge more fees for other researchers to read them--seems archaic. As the director of NIH is quoted in Washington Post, "the status quo is not an option." We feel that the proposed "compromise" of delaying PubMed's publication of new papers by up to six months is both reasonable and sufficient.
For more information about the NIH's public access proposal, visit NIH's public notice; to submit a comment to the NIH, use this form. For more information about the open access movement, see Open Access Overview by Dr. Peter Suber.
Posted by Emi on Sep 6, 2004