Government Makes NIH Research Open Access

TaeKwonDood writes "Let's give some credit to the government when they do something right; in this case freeing $29 billion of taxpayer money in NIH research to actual taxpayers. Within one year after peer review, NIH-funded research has to be made freely available on PubMed. A Democratic Congress passed it and a Republican president signed it. This is a tremendous asset to researchers who don't want to have to duplicate research or pay fees for every journal out there. Those media companies getting rich selling journals, like the ACS, don't like it, but everyone else will."

Comments

Free isn't the big thing - PubMed is

[LauraLolly]

This requirement for open publication is very nice for researchers and the public, but it's not completely new for research articles.

At The New England Journal of Medicine, subscribers have full access to all content, but folks who register - for free - have access to all research articles six months old and older. At Science, registered users have access to research articles at least twelve months old back to 1997. Science and NEJM are not the only journals or organizations with this option for registered users.

The real boon will not be in access to research articles for free, but in the ability to seach in a single location, rather than looking in forty places for information. The other real boon will be in access to summaries and reviews that are partially sponsored by NIH. There are many review articles in journals that aren't even abstracted at PubMed right now.

Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun

[Entropius]

The cost of the Iraq war is projected (by the GAO) to be around $2 trillion. That comes out to be about $300bn/year, counting the 6 years of Bush's tenure in which we'll be involved in it.

This is ten times the yearly expenditure on the NIH, yet there are more Americans who will develop (cancer | heart disease | diabetes/metabolic syndrome | clinical depression) than the entire population of Iraq.

Who's not spending their money wisely?

Yes, there is some dishonest stuff that goes on in the grant process, and the scientific community would appreciate any genuine help in stamping it out. But even if ten percent of NIH's funding is dumped in a pile and burned, NIH still produces more value per taxpayer dollar than many other things (read: the military, many forms of welfare, the military, farm subsidies, and -- right -- the military) that we spend our cash on.

Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun

[overeduc8ed]

Many of us young scientists are leaving the US, largely due to this situation. I recently graduated from a biomedically-oriented PhD program at a major California university. Including myself, about a third of the students who completed their degrees in the past year have gone to Europe or Japan or Australia. We've all seen how hard it is to get funding for a postdoc in the US now. In fact, I submitted the exact same research proposal to NIH and to a European funding agency. The NIH grant reviewers appeared to be looking for an excuse not to fund me and rejected it outright -- they claimed I had no experience with the type of research I was proposing to do, despite the fact that it directly followed from my dissertation and my previous five years of work! Totally demoralized, imagine my surprise when I found out the following month that the European agency scored me in the top 5% of their (extremely competitive) application pool.

What we might have developing here is a serious conflict-of-interest situation. NIH grants are generally reviewed by peer researchers within our scientific specialties. Since funds are now so limited, I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers themselves are thinking, "Well, if I score this grant favorably, that would leave less funding for my lab!"

But I digress. Star foreign scientists and students are no longer seeing a stint in the US as obligatory. Between the increasingly dire funding situation and immigration difficulties as well as rapidly increasing prestige of non-American research, they're opting to go elsewhere.

I also worry for the future of the US. But if the US doesn't want us back, I'll be more than happy living somewhere the people appreciate and respect science, and provide the funding to back it up.