The published findings of some of the nation's leading
health researchers will soon be a click away for the
masses.
Beginning May 2, National Institutes of Health-funded
investigators will be requested to submit voluntarily to
the NIH's PubMed Central an electronic version of their
final research manuscripts upon acceptance for
publication.
A chief aim of this new public access policy,
announced on Feb. 3, is to make NIH-funded research more
readily accessible to the public and to scholars. It is
also intended to create a stable, searchable and permanent
online archive of peer-reviewed research resulting from NIH
funding, of which Johns Hopkins is the largest
recipient.
NIH, the steward of medical and behavioral research
for the nation, awarded $14.6 billion in fiscal year 2004
alone to fund 37,060 research projects.
While the scientific publishing community has concerns
about how this will impact journal viability, many groups
have hailed the policy's ratification as a historic step in
giving taxpayers free access to discoveries for which they
paid.
The NIH defines the author's final manuscript as the
version accepted for journal publication, including all
modifications from the publishing peer review process.
Chi Dang, vice dean for research at the School of
Medicine and The Johns Hopkins Family Professor in Oncology
Research, said that he feels the NIH took the right
position to urge, but not require, investigators to submit
their manuscripts.
"I, for one, will be very interested to see how the
system works and the level of participation," said Dang,
who has five manuscripts on track to be published in the
next six months. "Ultimately, frankly, it's a laudable and
honorable thing to do. Information should be made as freely
accessible as possible. What will go online is not
someone's opinion. It's real peer-reviewed science."
Eaton Lattman, dean of research and graduate education
at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, said that the
policy's impact on individual researchers would likely be
negligible, as it will only entail an extra step at the
endpoint of the publication process for those who
participate.
While researchers already have access to the latest
findings coming out of their field, Lattman said those who
will benefit most from this "democratization" of research
publication will be the public at large and students. Both
groups will now have access to a great resource of the
latest scientific findings, he said.
Dang said that while the start date for the new policy
is only weeks away, it might take some time for the real
benefits of PubMed Central to be realized, depending on its
rate of population.
The authors' final manuscripts may be submitted in the
usual electronic formats--word processing or PDF
files--accepted by journals. Once the manuscript has been
submitted, the system will assign a PMC identification
number and generate an e-mail to the author(s) confirming
the submission. In cases in which the principal
investigator is not an author, a courtesy e-mail will be
sent to alert the PI of the submission. Corrections of
content errors and other necessary revisions of final
manuscripts will be accommodated.
At the time of voluntary submission to the PMC, the
authors will specify when their final manuscript can be
made publicly accessible. Posting for public accessibility
through PMC is strongly encouraged as soon as possible and
within 12 months of the publisher's official date of final
publication. Manuscripts will not be released prior to
publication.
From the onset, many in the publishing community have
expressed reservations about the policy, fearing it may
severely cut into their bottom line if a large percentage
of what they currently publish is made freely available
elsewhere.
Kathleen Keane, director of the
Johns Hopkins
University Press, said that while the publishing
community has a general sympathy for the goal that
federally funded research should be made available to the
public, questions still exist about how this policy will be
implemented and its impact on economic viability for some
journals and the peer-review process as a whole. Depending
on the implementation plan, the NIH online archive might
duplicate the investments and offerings of publishers,
Keane said, thus increasing costs overall. Some specific
concerns include how copyright issues will be handled:
contracts between authors and publishers may need to be
reconfigured, she said, and the NIH online archive's use
terms need to be identified.
Timothy Hays, NIH's project manager for the public
access policy implementation, said that both author and
publisher will hold copyrights of the manuscripts and that
use terms will be clearly stated on the PMC.
As to the long-term economic impact of the policy,
publishers are making individual assessments and will
likely retool their business models accordingly, according
to Keane.
The JHU Press, which publishes more than 50 journals,
has followed this issue very closely. Keane adds that the
Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the
Association of American Publishers, of which JHU Press is a
member, has been working with officials at the NIH to have
their concerns addressed.
Hays said that NIH will be listening to all
"stakeholders" in the coming months in an effort to further
refine the policy.
As additional details and instructions on the use of
the PMC manuscript submission system become available,
these items will be posted on the PMC Web site at
www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov. More information about the
NIH Public Access Policy can be found at
www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess. The manuscript
subscription site is located at nihms.nih.gov.