Update on NIH Policy Concerning Enhanced Access to Science: ASH’s New Alternative to NIH Policy on Public Access Removes Burden for Blood Authors
September 6, 2006 –
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) has just finalized and signed an agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that creates a new option for nonprofit publishers to comply with the NIH policy on enhanced access. This new program will remove the current burden for authors to submit their manuscripts and will maintain the publisher embargo period of up to 12 months. As a result of ASH’s participation in this program, all Blood authors who published NIH-funded articles from May 2005 forward have no obligation to submit manuscripts to the NIH archive because Blood will do this on their behalf.
Background
Effective May 2, 2005, NIH implemented a policy requesting that its grantees submit research articles accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed journal to PubMed Central (PMC), a component of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The NIH policy instructs grantees to designate how soon the (non-copyedited and non-formatted) manuscript should be released to the public, but no later than one year after journal publication.
In February of 2006, ASH and a group of nonprofit publishers met with NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, MD, to discuss another option to improve compliance with the current NIH policy on public access while maintaining the publisher-determined embargo period. We proposed a program for nonprofit publishers in which the publishers would provide NIH with final articles representing NIH-funded research for an internal use archive at NIH. This would achieve Dr. Zerhouni’s goal to create an archive of funded research to be used for portfolio management and linking to NIH databases for advancing science while maintaining the publisher subscription access period and the scientific integrity of the article. We also offered to work with NIH to extend PubMed searching to full text and links to all content on journal Web sites, not just NIH-funded research. Dr. Zerhouni was receptive to accepting the final article and was willing to accept the publisher embargo period. However, Dr. Zerhouni indicated that what is most important to him is to be able to display the content in addition to the journal Web sites, not just link, once the embargo period is over.
New PMC (NIH Portfolio) Archive Project
Since the meeting earlier this year, ASH and the other nonprofit publishers consulted with technical experts and online journal hosting servicers to better understand implications for our journals and what commitments we would need from the NIH. Several society publishers, including ASH, developed terms for an agreement with NIH that would work as follows:
- Participating nonprofit publishers will submit to NIH the final version of NIH-funded research articles upon publication on behalf of their authors. NIH will view the author as compliant with the policy and the author will not incur the burden of submitting and negotiating with NIH.
- NIH has internal use only of the articles during the journals' embargo periods (the time period when articles must be purchased), which can be no longer than 12 months. During the embargo period, NIH can link to the journal Web sites to provide access to NIH-funded research articles. Following the embargo period, NIH can provide links to the journal, but also could distribute the articles directly from its PMC Web site.
- Following the embargo period, NIH’s view of an article will include a page banner that identifies the corresponding journal and provides a link to the journal’s own Web site.
- NIH obtains 100% compliance from participating journals and can use the full and final text to develop links to other databases and use the articles in managing research.
As we neared completion of our negotiations, however, NIH inserted a new provision in the agreement that allows the NLM to provide a PMC International archive all of the participants’ content at the completion of the publisher embargo period. In other words, NIH now wants to share its funded research articles with foreign country archives. Some of the publishers engaged in the steering group have found this new provision to be duplicative and unacceptable; others have agreed to continue to participate.
ASH has volunteered to have Blood be the first participant in the program and has signed a one-year agreement with NIH. ASH will provide articles going back to the original May 2005 implementation date of the current policy. This means NIH-funded Blood authors from the May 2005 issue forward will not have to independently submit their manuscripts to NIH because Blood will submit the final article on their behalf.
Some Final Thoughts
While this PMC (NIH Portfolio) Archive program may not be ideal – it continues to have some duplicative provisions to the current private sector publishing model and some troubling policy impacts – ASH believes it will achieve NIH’s goals of managing its research portfolio and developing a digital research archive as well as increasing compliance with its policy, which now stands at less than 4%. In addition, ASH believes this program will protect the integrity of journal articles, maintain our journal business model, and, significantly relieve our member-researcher-authors from the burden of submitting manuscripts to NIH. In addition, considering the mounting pressure to tighten the current NIH access policy, ASH believes the PMC (NIH Portfolio) Archive program provides a better alternative for authors and journals than a mandated policy with a shorter embargo period. Finally, while implementing this program over the course of the year, ASH hopes to continue to work with the NIH on ways to enhance access.
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