Revised NIH Public Access Policy

Last Friday, the NIH released its revised Public Access Policy in response to the Congressional mandate to upgrade public archiving compliance to a funding requirement. Over the weekend, the NIH subsequently redesigned the Policy website, including the FAQs. I encourage you to visit the site and read through the FAQs, but in the meantime, here are the highlights:

• April 7, 2008 - date the Policy goes into effect; applies to grants and cooperative agreements active in Fiscal Year 2008 (Oct. 1, 2007-Sept. 30, 2008) and beyond, as well as to any contracts signed on or after the effective date
• May 25, 2008 - all applications, proposals and progress reports must include the PubMed Central ID number (PMCID) when citing articles that are affected by the policy; this includes articles not only authored/co-authored by the investigator, but any papers stemming from his or her award
• As of Jan. 14, 313 journals deposit articles into PMC on behalf of authors, so if papers are published in these journals, no further action is needed
• Non-compliance is "not a factor in the evaluation of grant applications," but "may delay or prevent awarding of funds"
• Articles submitted to PMC that stem from research funded by multiple awards only need to be archived once, as more than one award funding number can be attached to the record
• NIH revised the estimated number of articles published annually stemming from NIH-funded research to 80,000 articles

If you have any questions, please contact Molly Keener at 716-4203 or mkeener [at] wfubmc.edu

NIH mandate date: April 7

The NIH announced today that the revised public access policy mandating archiving in PMC goes into effect April 7, 2008, *MUCH* sooner than I (and likely many others) had hoped for. The official release can be found here, and Peter Suber’s blog announcement – how I learned of it – can be found here.

More information will be coming, but for now I’m heading home to enjoy a feast of crow with a big grin on my face!

Mandate victory for NIH

On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision (Division G, Title II, General Provisions, Section 218) directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its previously voluntary Public Access Policy from a request to a requirement. Here is what the law stipulates:

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.

This means that all articles accepted for publication in scholarly journals that stem from research funded in whole or in part by awards from the NIH must be archived in PubMed Central (PMC)—approximately 65,000 peer-reviewed articles annually. Although there are several hundred journals automatically archived in PMC by publishers, the responsibility for ensuring deposit falls on the authors themselves. Fortunately, Carpenter Library links to several tools to help authors – or those persons designed to make PMC submissions on their behalf – navigate the publishing and depositing process.

Although this is the first instance of the U.S. Government mandating free public accessibility to research funded by a major agency, this is not the first mandate on the scene. The NIH mandate joins company with another 20 funder, 11 institutional and 3 departmental mandates, including those from the Wellcome Trust, 6 of 7 UK Research Councils, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

For further analysis of the NIH mandate victory, see the January issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, and Gavin Baker’s response and predictions.

It will likely be some time before the NIH issues the new policy; in the meantime you can familiarize yourself with the deposit process by complying with the voluntary Public Access Policy. If you have questions or concerns, or would like to request a group presentation on the current Public Access Policy and PubMed Central, contact Molly Keener at 716-4203 or mkeener [at] wfubmc.edu.

Update: NIH Public Access Mandate

Although I realize this blog is a platform for bringing fellow staff up-to-speed on information gleaned from various meetings and conferences we attend, I wanted to take this opportunity to update everyone on recent Congressional action that, if signed into law, will have significant impact for our campus.

Last week, the Senate passed an appropriations bill that includes language that would strengthen the current NIH Public Access Policy from a request to a mandate, making manuscript archiving in PubMed Central a condition of receiving NIH funding. In July, the House passed a similar bill also stipulating a mandate. Both bills are now in conference to be reconciled before being sent to the President. Unfortunately, due to disagreements over funding, the President has threatened to veto this bill. Although the veto threat is not over the proposed NIH Public Access Mandate, lobbyists are working hard to see that the mandate language is removed altogether. In fact, although they were withdrawn before the final Senate vote, publisher lobbyists were successful in persuading Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) to attach two amendments to the bill that would have rendered the mandate language null.

If this bill becomes law with the mandate provision intact, here is what you need to know:

• The NIH Public Access Mandate would apply to any research article accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal (both traditional and open access journals) that stems from research funded in whole or in part by NIH awards
• Authors would be responsible for ensuring that a copy of their final peer-reviewed manuscript (commonly known as a postprint) is archived in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication
• The mandate would be fully compliant with existing U.S. copyright law, and although it would be wise for our faculty authors to retain their copyrights when publishing, they may still transfer their copyrights to publishers AND archive their postprints in PMC; approx. 70% of publisher policies already enable authors to archive postprints in either institutional or subject repositories; publisher archiving policies may be searched using the SHERPA-RoMEO database
• Approx. 68% of all external research funding at WFUHS in the past five fiscal years came from NIH (this excludes any subcontract awards)
• Currently, voluntary compliance to the NIH Public Access Policy by WFUHS faculty authors is consistent with the national average – around 5%; however, because publishers can also contribute publications to PMC, closer to 10% of WFUHS faculty-authored journal articles are freely accessible in PMC
• In anticipation of a mandate, and to highlight papers already in PMC, a field for the PMCID (the unique identifier assigned to archived articles) has been added to the Faculty Publications input screen in PeopleSoft; by including the PMCID, users who search Fac Pubs will be able to link directly to those articles

Please see the November issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter for Peter Suber's recap of the NIH Public Access Policy/Mandate progress to date and explanation of what to expect in the future.

There has been interesting discussion about the NIH Public Access Mandate and its implications on the Liblicense listserv in recent days. You can read the archived discussion that took place in October here, and the ongoing discussion here. As you can imagine, confusion over this mandate and its effects on scholarly publishing is rampant, and debates over the necessity of open/public access mandates are rife with misinformation and misunderstanding. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.