NIH Loosens The Other Open Access Shoe

The leader in the U.S. open access clubhouse is the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The NIH Public Access Policy, established in 2008, requires NIH-funded grantees to submit an electronic version of their papers within 12 months of publication to PubMedCentral.  (The policy encourages submission at the time the paper is accepted for publication, but we need to take baby steps.)

The policy has been successful in increasing the availability of federally funded research.  According to the NIH, on a typical weekday over 700,000 visitors access over 1.5 million papers.  However, not all papers are in compliance, and NIH wants to change that.

So, starting in the spring, researchers seeking non-competing continuation awards who have not made their research compliant with the policy will not receive funds.  No open access, no extension of your grant.  The NIH Deputy Director for External Research recommends that researchers think about open access submission well in advance of the reporting deadlines:

“The challenge is that publication occurs throughout the year, and progress reporting occurs once a year. So I encourage principal investigators to start thinking about public access compliance when papers are planned. Discuss with your co-authors how the paper will be submitted to PubMed Central, and who will do so, along with all the other tasks of paper writing. The easiest thing to do, perhaps even today, is to take a couple of minutes to enter the NIH-supported papers you have published in the last year into My NCBI to ensure you meet the requirements of the policy regardless of when your non-competing continuation is due. This will help you avoid a last minute scramble that could delay your funding.”

This may seem like a small step, but it strikes me as necessary before any other changes to the NIH policy (such as measures to encourage faster submission to PubMedCentral) can happen.