NIH Open Access Policy Details Outlined in Washington Post

The Washington Post reported Jan. 18, 2005, that NIH will call for all scientific publications of its grantees to be archived on its PubMed Central database within one year of publication, instead of within six months as the draft policy requested. NIH was set to announce its open access policy last week but abruptly postponed its release. The new policy has not been announced, but Elias Zerhouni, MD, Director of NIH, confirmed in an interview with "Washington Fax" published January 21, 2005, that the new policy will take effect in the spring.

In the "Washington Fax" interview, Dr. Zerhouni also indicated that the new policy will not allow PubMed Central to link to the articles in the journal where they were originally published, but would archive a PDF file supplied by the author.

APA's was one of a reported six thousand comments received by NIH that helped inform the final policy. APA's comments raised concerns about reposting articles from its journals on the public database after only six months. APA publishes 37 scholarly journals, some of which have a majority of articles that describe NIH-funded research, and some of which publish few NIH-related articles. Steven Breckler, PhD, APA's Executive Director for Science, said, "If the details in the Post are accurate, it looks like a step in the right direction. We had asked NIH to gather more data on the impact of an open access policy on nonprofit publishers like APA, so that a new policy would not cause the loss of publication outlets for scientists. It looks as if NIH is being somewhat, though not entirely, responsive to the concerns that we and other nonprofit scientific publishers raised."

Read the Washington Post article
Read APA's Open Access Comments
Read a summary of NIH's draft policy

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