A new era in public access to the results of medical research starts next week, as the policy of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to ask all investigators who receive federal funds to make their results freely available comes into effect.
Dr Robert Steinbrook, a national correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine , predicts in the journal this week that some journal editors and publishers will be "riled" by the recommendations initiated by Dr Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH (2005;352:1739).
Dr Zerhouni has asked researchers whose work was supported by public funding to voluntarily submit an electronic copy of their manuscripts, when they are accepted for publication, to PubMed Central. The author can specify when the article will be available for release during a period of 12 months after final publication.
In a recent news conference Dr Zerhouni said, "With the rapid growth in the public's use of the internet, NIH must take a leadership role in making available to the public the research that we support.
"While this new policy is voluntary, we are strongly encouraging all NIH supported researchers to release their published manuscripts as soon as possible for the benefit of the public ... We urge publishers to work closely with authors in implementing this policy."
A similar initiative in the United Kingdom led to controversy recently when some editors and publishers said that free online dissemination of research articles might cause some medical journals to "go broke and close" (BMJ 2005;330:923, 23 Apr).
The NIH initiative was praised by Dr Gavin Yamey, senior editor at Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine . He said, "Scientific information should be seen as a global public good and should be freely available to the public. The NIH public access plan will create a centralised, publicly available archive of full text articles—a treasury of medical knowledge."
In response to concerns that differing versions of a paper might cause confusion, as authors are asked to submit their accepted manuscripts for electronic filing before medical journals edit the paper, resulting in conflicting versions, Dr Yamey said, "The ball is in the journals' court. Journals themselves can prevent this confusion by doing the right thing and depositing the copyedited version into PubMed Central."
Dr Michael Wilkes, vice dean for medical education and professor of medicine at the University of California School of Medicine at Davis, reacted to the charge that some medical journals might be forced to close by asking, "So what?" He said, "How is the world going to be any poorer if [some journals] go out of business? Publicly funded studies belong to the public. I don't think there should be a system where a middleman makes a profit at the public's expense. If journals are going to survive, they have to have added value."
The "added value," said Dr Wilkes, could include summaries of research reports and providing critical analysis of the literature.
Information about the NIH public access implementation plan can be found at www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm and the associated press release is at www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm