Endocrine Insider
April 3, 2008

NIH held a meeting, on March 20, to provide an opportunity for stakeholder comment on its new public access policy to implement the congressional requirement that all NIH-funded research be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. The majority of meeting attendees were members of the publishing or library communities or representatives of academic institutions or patient advocacy groups. While almost all in attendance supported the concept of public access to research results, many had concerns with the NIH implementation plan. There were differing opinions from the stakeholders about how best to fulfill the congressional mandate for public access while allowing publishers to continue to add value to research through peer review.

NIH heard comments from many in attendance. Several encouraged the agency to undertake a formal rulemaking process as described in the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/laws/administrative-procedure/), asserting that the current aggressive timeline for implementation disallowed meaningful input from stakeholders.

Independent researchers were not well represented at the March 20 meeting, and the NIH plan for implementation contains some potentially troublesome requirements for grantees and applicants. These requirements are scheduled to go into effect on May 25, 2008. Nonetheless, NIH has issued a request for information (RFI) seeking public comment (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/comments.htm) that is open through May 31. The Endocrine Society will be examining the policy and the RFI to address matters of concern to researchers. One requirement of NIH-funded scientists is that they deposit their accepted manuscripts into PubMed Central. While the Society will fulfill this requirement for articles published in its own journals by submitting the final published article, members are individually responsible for ensuring they are in compliance for submissions to publications other than Society journals.