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Guest blog co-authored by Dr. Lyric Jorgenson and Dr. Stephen Sherry. Originally posted on the Under the Poliscope blog.
We say it all the time – NIH is the steward of the Nation’s investment in biomedical research. But what does that really mean? For us, it means making sure NIH delivers on its mission to turn discovery into health. To turn this into reality, NIH develops policies to support responsible and innovative research, and to ensure that individuals across the country can realize the benefits from their investments in research.
Need proof? NIH has long championed access to research products, whether it be access to research data (e.g., NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy), research results (e.g., 2008 NIH Public Access Policy), or even in research inventions (e.g., draft NIH IRP Access Policy). These policies reflect NIH’s unwavering commitment to helping patients, families, and healthcare providers better understand and address the most critical health concerns facing their communities and spur future research and translation of research results to new products and practices.
In that spirit, today I’m pleased to share the news that NIH is releasing a new NIH Public Access Policy to make the results of NIH-funded research accessible as quickly as possible. The new Policy, which will replace the 2008 Public Access Policy upon effective date, removes the twelve-month embargo period to provide accelerated access to published manuscripts. Importantly, NIH was cognizant while developing this Policy that it would not exacerbate potential inequities in publishing, and as such, work within the existing policy framework to minimize new burdens on the research community.
Alongside the new Policy, NIH is also releasing its plan to make it easier for researchers, clinicians, students, and the public to find and make use of research results. Particularly, NIH is outlining how researchers and institutions should leverage use of metadata and persistent identifiers and proposes new requirements for NIH-supported repositories to collect and make this information available and searchable.
More information on this plan and information on how to provide comments can be found here. These efforts are also aligned with activities across the rest of government as we all work to implement the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) memo Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.
Today is a milestone day for us all, as NIH funded research will now be publicly available without delay. We look forward to hearing from you on how to continue to promote the highest level of transparency and accountability in research as we continue on this journey together.
We wish you the happiest of holidays and look forward to discussing the issue of public access more with you in 2025!
This article does not address if there is any new agreement with the publishers.
Who will pay the journal APC fee for immediate open access ?
Does this mean if we publish in high-impact journals,
for example Nature series, which charges 12 – 20,000 dollar for immediate open access,
that we have to pay this extra money from our NIH research funds?
Came here to say the same. Some APC’s are out of control, especially in the genetics space. TT faculty are trying to publish articles in high impact journals to support their career and these charges are presenting a real barrier. It’s all very well to say include the costs in the grant budget, but every dollar allocated to publishing costs is a dollar not available for the actual research.
And it’s pointless to say we don’t have to pay to make a paper open access, that we can submit the author-accepted manuscript to PMC. Unless the journal is operating a hybrid model, we have to agree to pay the fee to get the paper accepted. So, how does this mean we don’t have to pay for open access?
NIH bears some responsibility here. They could have leveraged their massive impact as the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. If they’d capped APCs back in the days when they were relatively small, that might have been a brake on publishers asking ever-increasing amounts of money that are frankly unjustifiable.