What if I am a journalist?

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is eager to assist you in writing articles about this developing movement. ATA can supply you with contacts from our diverse membership who'll describe their powerful motivations for joining together to support taxpayer access to biomedical research. For an interview, email the ATA press contact.

The combination of a large increase in the research workforce, a large increase in the average dollar cost of all grants, and the proliferation of "misleading urban legends" regarding NIH funding patterns has prompted NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, MD, not only to take his gloves off to educate Congress and the public about the value of their investment in his agency, but also to call for the science community to show its mettle...

Scientists complaining about NIH's post-doubling funding policies should redirect their hue and cry to Congress and the White House and stop blaming the victim, Nobel Prize winners Michael Bishop, MD, and Harold Varmus, MD, declare in the April 28 issue of the journal Science...

An NIH advisory panel charged with implementing a public-access policy has reaffirmed its November 2005 recommendation that all NIH-funded research be made publicly available via PubMed Central no later than six months after publication.
The panel, Public Access Working Group (PAWG), reissued its call for a mandatory, six-month public-access policy at a meeting on April 10. NIH's current policy in this area was issued last May and calls for voluntary posting of agency-funded work on PubMed Central within a year of publication. The goals of the public-access policy are to enable NIH to better manage its research portfolio and to provide the public with electronic access to NIH-funded research publications...

Excerpt: A panel of private-sector representatives and chemical informatics experts met with NIH officials Dec. 19 to settle the lingering debate surrounding the agency's PubChem database, which some contend unnecessarily duplicates for-profit services.
NIH officials sought to convince the advisory panel that PubChem, a public database of the biological activities of small molecules and a part of the agency's Roadmap for Medical Research, is not as comprehensive as many of its commercial counterparts. "PubChem really has very limited information about chemistry," said John Schwab, PhD, program director at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "We're really very much dependent on other resources, primarily the private sector, to offer the detailed information about chemistry that's really lacking," he said.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the majority of the working group said they were leaving with a more positive outlook on PubChem. The panel, which reports to the Board of Scientific Counselors of NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), was convened at the behest of Congress. Over the summer, NIH was advised in House and Senate appropriations language to work with private chemical information providers to ensure that PubChem does not overlap with their services ( Research Policy Alert, June 21, 2005 )...

Excerpt: This is regarding your Dec. 19 editorial "To your e-health." The lack of competition in scientific publishing leads to extraordinarily high prices of research journals. The high prices mean that only health-care professionals and researchers affiliated with well-to-do institutions are able to obtain access to the vast array of relevant published research results. The average citizen faces significant barriers. Parents of children with rare genetic diseases who are active and engaged advocates for their children's health find themselves sneaking into research libraries, hiring students in large medical schools to go to the stacks for them or "borrowing" others' IDs and passwords to search electronic databases--all to read the results of research that is funded with their taxpayer dollars...

Excerpt: SPARC executive Heather Joseph this week praised a linking plan by 57 nonprofit publishers, signatories of the DC principles for free access to research (see LJ Academic Newswire 11/1/05), saying it was an excellent plan on its merits--but not necessarily an alternative to the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) public access policy. "This is the same proposal they made a year-and-half ago," Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire. "It's a good plan, but it doesn't go the extra step we need it to go." That step, Joseph explained, is "access now and in perpetuity" for all publicly funded research.
"The problem with linking out from the PubMed site to publishers' sites is that is does not create a dependable repository. It depends on the largesse of publishers and, as well-intentioned as they are, there is no guarantee they will be there tomorrow," Joseph said.

Last year, a huge scuffle broke out over a National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan to ask grantees to submit their accepted papers to a free archive. Open-access advocates hailed the move, whereas journals said they would be bankrupted. But 2 monnths after the policy went into effect, most researchers seem to be ignoring it...

In its statement coinciding with last week’s rollout of the National Institute[s] of Health’s (NIH) public access plan, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) reiterated that the policy was a “positive step” but also voiced concern that the policy’s voluntary nature and discretionary timeframe may hinder the progress NIH director Elias Zerhouni anticipated...

After months of often heated discussion, the National Institute of Health's (NIH) public access policy went into effect yesterday. Under the plan, NIH grantees are “strongly encouraged”—though not required—to deposit their final papers into the NIH's PubMed Central digital archive...

A new era for online public access to the biomedical literature is about to begin. As of May 2, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has asked the investigators it funds to submit voluntarily to PubMed Central an electronic copy of any scientific report, on acceptance for publication, and to specify when the article should become public. According to the NIH, “Posting for public accessibility through [PubMed Central] is requested and strongly encouraged as soon as possible (and within twelve months of the publisher's official date of final publication)”...

...On February 3, NIH director Elias Zerhouni gamely did what bureaucrats often must do—he stepped up and touted his drastically altered plan as a “win-win.” SPARC executive director Rick Johnson, one of the NIH proposal's most ardent supporters, also did what he had to do—he found a silver lining, calling the “NIH discussion” a powerful demonstration of why “open access is a matter of good public policy.” But after months in which the open access movement made national headlines, in the end, little changed. Or did it...

A new policy asks scientists who receive research funds from the National Institutes of Health to voluntarily submit copies of their peer-reviewed research manuscripts to a digital archive at the National Library of Medicine. Manuscripts will be made available free to the public within a year after the research is published in a scientific journal....

Ending months of uncertainty, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni last week unveiled a policy aimed at making the results of research it funds more freely available. But the announcement has injected a new element of controversy into an already bitter debate. Zerhouni is asking NIH-funded researchers to send copies of manuscripts that have been accepted for publication to a free NIH archive...

NIH Director Elias Zerhouni on Thursday released details of a new agency policy that requests scientists make agency-funded research publicly available online at no cost within 12 months of publication in a scientific journal, the Washington Post reports...

Researchers who receive grant money from the National Institutes of Health will be “asked” to submit their results to a public Web site within a year after they are published in a scientific journal, under a new and controversial NIH policy announced yesterday...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced a new policy that should give the public speedier access to thousands of published medical studies...

The National Institutes of Health announced on Thursday its policy for providing free access to the large swaths of the scientific literature that draw on research it has financed. As had been widely expected, the policy asks scientists to post their papers online within a year of publication in a peer-reviewed journal...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Elias Zerhouni indicated at a gathering of 43 scientific journal publishers and editors Wednesday (July 28) that eventually all NIH-financed research will be freely available to the public...

As public access proponents and private-sector officials fight over influence in disseminating government-funded health information, the National Institutes of Health is trying to strike a balance with a new public access policy for the department's database...

NIH’s final public access publication policy calls for study authors to post their research manuscripts on the PubMed Central database as soon as possible but allows them a 12 month timeframe...

The National Institutes of Health unveils a plan to offer a Web site giving consumers free access to published government health studies. The plan comes after pressure from patient advocacy groups and Congress...

Hoping to “change the landscape of scientific publishing,” National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Elias Zerhouni unveiled a new voluntary policy today asking NIH-funded researchers to submit copies of their manuscripts to a free archive. NIH will post the papers 12 months after they are published, or sooner if the author asks...

A government effort helps consumers get free access to scientific studies funded by taxpayers. Officials from the National Institutes of Health are expected to unveil the plan at a press conference today...

The National Institutes of Health spends billions of tax dollars each year to investigate human disease. But if you want to find the latest research on a particular illness, good luck...

NIH’s final policy on public access will instruct authors to designate when their manuscripts on agency-funded research should be posted on NIH’s PubMed Central digital library following journal publication, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, MD, said...

HHS Secretary nominee Michael Leavitt assured members of the Senate Finance Committee that he supports the principles guiding the proposed NIH public access policy during his confirmation hearing Jan. 19...

Just weeks after its director defended a controversial draft policy for providing free access to scientific literature, the National Institutes of Health appears to be softening its stance. A newspaper report on Tuesday said that the NIH's final policy, which is not yet public, would ask scientists to post their papers online a year after they were published by a journal, instead of just six months...

The National Institutes of Health has proposed a major policy change that would require all scientists who receive funding from the agency to make the results of their research available to the public for free...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) wants to wait up to 1 year after publication before posting a free copy of articles based on NIH-funded research on the web. That's double the length of time it proposed last fall in the wake of congressional pressure to give the public greater access to such research...

In a letter sent last week to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), led by SPARC Director Rick Johnson and supported by an array of library organizations, expressed its frustration over the seemingly scuttled plan to offer free access within six months to NIH-funded journals. "We are deeply disappointed by the delay," wrote Johnson...

...Lipman, a biotechnologist at the National Institutes of Health...wants to change this. He is helping to coordinate an effort to give the public easier access to government-funded research published in medical journals. The NIH is considering a proposal that would ask researchers to provide a copy of each journal article they write about NIH-supported projects. Those articles, which often are copyrighted and tightly controlled by the journals, would be made available for free on the Internet through a permanent archive. ...

With the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) plan to open up access to the research endorsed by Congress, a nascent collective of commercial STM publishers and medical groups announced their own plan for increased access. The coalition effort, patientINFORM includes top commercial STM publishers Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley, plus the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and American Diabetes Association, among others...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) abruptly cancelled a teleconference with director Elias A. Zerhouni scheduled for Tuesday, at which he was to announce "a new policy designed to accelerate the public's access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research"...

In a classic Washington political twist, The NIH abruptly cancelled a press conference scheduled for Tuesday that was expected to announce a new NIH policy promoting free access to taxpayer funded medical research--and it now appears that the NIH policy itself will be significantly scaled back from its original plan...

White House political strategy was behind the decision to postpone indefinitely an NIH teleconference set for January 11 to announce a new policy designed to accelerate the public’s access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research...

A BATTLE OF WORDS: Proponents and critics of open access have had a lot to talk about these days as they anxiously await the U.S. government's final plan to make large swaths of scientific literature freely available...