Mandating access: assessing the NIH’s public access policy

SUMMARY In April 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented the Public Access Policy (PAP), which mandated that the full text of NIH-supported articles be made freely available on PubMed Central – the NIH’s repository of biomedical research. This paper uses 600,000 NIH articles and a matched comparison sample to examine how the PAP impacted researcher access to the biomedical literature and publishing patterns in biomedicine. Though some estimates allow for large citation increases after the PAP, the most credible estimates suggest that the PAP had a relatively modest effect on citations, which is consistent with most researchers having widespread access to the biomedical literature prior to the PAP, leaving little room to increase access. I also find that NIH articles are more likely to be published in traditional subscription-based journals (as opposed to ‘open access’ journals) after the PAP. This indicates that any discrimination the PAP induced, by subscription-based journals against NIH articles, was offset by other factors – possibly the decisions of editors and submission behaviour of authors.

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Publishing trends of journals with manuscripts in PubMed Central: changes from 2008–2009 to 2015–2016

Journal of the Medical Library Association JMLA ◽

10.5195/jmla.2018.457 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 106 (4) ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Lauren Topper ◽

Diane Boehr

Keyword(s):

National Institutes Of Health ◽

Public Access ◽

Manuscript Submission ◽

National Library ◽

Pubmed Central ◽

The Public ◽

Access Policy ◽

Funded Research ◽

Biomedical Journals ◽

Bibliographic Data

Objective: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy mandates that all articles containing NIH-funded research must be deposited into PubMed Central (PMC). The aim of this study was to assess publishing trends of journals that were not selected for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) collection but contain NIH-funded articles submitted to PMC in compliance with the public access policy. In addition, the authors investigated the degree to which NIH-funded research is published in journals that NLM does not collect due to concerns with the publishers.Methods: We analyzed bibliographic data from the NIH Manuscript Submission system for journals that were not selected for the NLM collection from August 2015 to August 2016. Publications (n=738) were analyzed by language, publishing country, publishing format, and subject, and the results were compared to a similar study of 2008–2009 data. In addition, publications were analyzed by whether their publishers are collected by NLM, as determined by transparency and adherence to publishing best practices.Results: Only a few differences were found between the studies. Most notably, while both studies revealed that most journals were not selected for the NLM collection because they were out of scope (i.e., not biomedical), we noted an increase in 2015–2016 in biomedical journals containing NIH-funded articles that were not added to the collection due to concerns with the publishers.Conclusions: While the current number of NIH-funded manuscripts being published by publishers that are not collected by NLM remains quite small, we noted a substantial increase between 2008–2009 and 2015–2016.

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