Congress approves the NIH planAfter months of campaigning, debating, strategizing, negotiating, lobbying, educating, and waiting, the big news has finally happened. Congress approved the NIH plan. In July, the House Appropriations Committee directed that the NIH develop an open-access plan, but in September the Senate declined to include similar language in its own appropriations bill. The two appropriations bills had to be reconciled in a conference committee.
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #80
December 2, 2004
by Peter Suber
On November 20 the conference committee approved the following language:
Note that the conference committee emphasized that the NIH would "request" grantees to deposit their work, and that grantee deposit would be "voluntary". This is not the mandate originally sketched by the House Appropriations Committee. On the other hand, the draft NIH plan promises to monitor deposits "as part of the annual grant progress review and close-out process", which raises the possibility that non-compliant grantees may lose future funding. The conferees said nothing to discourage that kind of monitoring or that consequence of non-compliance.
- The conferees are aware of the draft NIH policy on increasing public access to NIH-funded research. Under this policy, NIH would request investigators to voluntarily submit electronically the final, peer reviewed author's copy of their scientific manuscripts; six months after the publisher's date of publication, NIH would make this copy publicly available through PubMed Central. The policy is intended to help ensure the permanent preservation of NIH-funded research and make it more readily accessible to scientists, physicians, and the public. The conferees note the comment period for the draft policy ended November 16th; NIH is directed to give full and fair consideration to all comments before publishing its final policy. The conferees request NIH to provide the estimated costs of implementing this policy each year in its annual Justification of Estimates to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. In addition, the conferees direct NIH to continue to work with the publishers of scientific journals to maintain the integrity of the peer review system.
The conferees instruct the NIH to "continue to work" with journal publishers. But the only concern they mention is "to maintain the integrity of the peer review system". They don't mention maintaining profits, surpluses, or the subscription model for paying the bills. This is welcome precision.
Despite intense lobbying by publishers, the conferees did not oppose the plan, delay it, or modify it. They did not even remain silent about it, which would have allowed the NIH to proceed without Congressional endorsement. Instead, they positively approved the new policy. It's a good sign that a Republican-controlled Congress approved the plan with bipartisan support, underlining the fact that open access is a bipartisan issue. It's also a good sign that other federal funding agencies may be encouraged to consider similar policies.
Congress has spoken. The President still has to sign the appropriations bill, but all omens suggest that he will. Congress has put the language into an omnibus "must-sign" bill and has already eliminated the provisions most offensive to the administration. (For complex procedural reasons, the bill may not go to the President for signature until the week of December 6.)
NIH will revise its draft plan in light of the comments it received during the period of public comment. Because of the volume of comments --over 6,000-- the NIH will miss the original deadline, December 1, stipulated in the House bill. It's hard to know what changes the NIH might introduce as a result of the public comments. But after the new draft is final, the agency will start to implement the new policy.
The fact that the policy was approved may give immediate support and courage to other funding agencies, other stakeholders and policy-makers, and other governments. However, don't expect immediate fruits from the new policy in the form of open-access research articles in PubMed Central. First, the NIH must receive grant applications, evaluate them, and award grants. Then the grantees must do the research. Then they must write it up. Then they must submit their manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals, and perhaps resubmit them until they are accepted somewhere and published. We'll have to wait six months after that to see free online editions in PubMed Central. The new infusion will start as a trickle, many months from now, but it will turn into a mighty tide.
This is the largest single step toward free online access in the history of the OA movement. The NIH is the largest funder of medical research in the world, with a $28 billion budget for next year alone. The new policy will apply to all future NIH-funded research published in journals. The significance of this step is not that it's "mandated" open access from a public funding agency; it could have been, but both NIH and Congress want to deemphasize the "mandate". It's simply the largest single initiative to provide free online access to peer-reviewed scientific research. It's not only the largest to date, but because of the size of the NIH budget it's likely to be the largest ever. It will affect an enormous body of literature directly, and many other funding agencies and disciplines indirectly.
The plan did not need Congressional approval, but received it. The effort to secure it created an important new coalition for open access among researchers, universities, libraries, and patient advocacy organizations. This new coalition was both the cause and the effect of rising public recognition that there is an important public interest in sharing the knowledge produced by taxpayer-funded research.
The final version of the House Appropriations Bill, HR 4818
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:hr04818:
Conference report to accompany HR 4818, Joint Explanatory Statement
http://www.house.gov/rules/stmgrh4818ttext1.htm
(See pp. 104-105 for the conference committee language on the NIH plan.)
* Postscript. The press has been *very* slow to pick up on this big story. Newspapers that covered the long and sometimes sharp debate between proponents and opponents have not yet announced the result, let alone commented on its significance. Is it possible that breakthrough success is boring and only bickering is newsworthy?
For the news coverage of the plan from November, see the section on major news stories, below.
----------
Read this issue online
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3997175/suber_news80.htmlSOAN is published and sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
http://www.arl.org/sparc/Additional support is provided by Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), experts in converting research documents to XML.
http://www.dclab.com/public_access.asp
==========
This is the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (ISSN 1546-7821), written by Peter Suber and published by SPARC. The views I express in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of SPARC or other sponsors.
To unsubscribe, send any message (from the subscribed address) to <SPARC-OANews-off@arl.org>.
Please feel free to forward any issue of the newsletter to interested colleagues. If you are reading a forwarded copy, see the instructions for subscribing at either of the next two sites below.
SPARC home page for the Open Access Newsletter and Open Access Forum
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/soan
Peter Suber's page of related information, including the newsletter editorial position
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm
Newsletter, archived back issues
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
Forum, archived postings
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SOA-Forum/List.html
Conferences Related to the Open Access Movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/conf.htm
Timeline of the Open Access Movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
peter.suber@earlham.edu
SOAN is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
Return to the Newsletter archive