Health Institute Begins Open-Access Grant Policy

A new policy that will require research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be made accessible for free online went into effect yesterday, according to an announcement from the institute.

The open-access requirement, which was announced this January, applies to research accepted for publication from yesterday onward. The policy requires an electronic version of the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of NIH-funded research be made available to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central within 12 months of the official date of publication.

“It codifies what had been a voluntary policy,” said Kevin Casey, Harvard’s director of federal and state relations. “It’s the next step in the movement that has been under foot for the last three or four years to get more publications into the general public domain.”

The follows a campaign at Harvard to increase access to scholarly articles published by members of the faculty. A proposal by the Faculty Council—the highest governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—in September 2007 proposed that scholarly work be immediately placed online for free access.

Debate over the issue centered on whether such open-access policies could put scholarly journals—which rely heavily on subscriptions—out of business, thus limiting the number of journals in which professors could publish.

But the NIH’s new policy may not have much practical significance for many scientific researchers, especially because of the 12-month lag time prescribed by the new policy, according to Casey.

“The deadline is within 12 months—that is a time frame in which most journals will be able to preserve their leading roles in the publication process and accomplish what the public access have wanted to have,” Casey said.

In fact, Casey noted that several journals already have such time-lag policies.

The New England Journal of Medicine, based in Waltham, Mass., has been allowing articles that are more than six months old to be freely accessible to the public in full since 2001, according to Jennifer Zeis, a journal spokeswoman.

“The new policies do not impact our current model, and they haven’t changed anything for us,” she wrote in an e-mail.

—Staff writer Aditi Balakrishna can be reached at balakris@fas.harvard.edu.