Benefits of the NIH Public Access Policy

The new NIH policy is an important step forward for science, scientists, and the higher education community. A wide range of academic and public stakeholders have vigorously supported adoption of such a measure. Here are some of the benefits:

• PubMed Central deposit is a convenient substitute for the submission of print copies of articles in fulfillment of grants reporting requirements.

• Research in PubMed Central is available to virtually all Internet users, regardless of whether their library subscribes to the journal in which the research is published. This will greatly expand access to the estimated 80,000 articles that result each year from NIH funding for use in research, teaching, and patient care. We estimate that UC articles make up 8% of that 80,000 or 6000 articles per year.

• A consequence of making work more visible among scientists around the world is greater impact. A number of studies on the citation advantage of open access have shown that open access articles are, on the whole, more highly cited.

• The open environment provided by NIH will facilitate development of new kinds of computational research techniques. Already the full-texts of journal articles in PubMed Central are linked to other scientific databases such as GenBank, enabling researchers to observe and explore relationships that may not previously have been apparent.

• The National Library of Medicine will provide long-term digital archiving of articles in PubMed Central, ensuring tomorrow’s researchers can build on today’s findings.

• The NIH policy precedent can open the door for institutions to secure expanded rights to use research in teaching, learning, and research.

• Adapted from NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities by the Association of Research Libraries.