Access to research urged

Pressure is mounting for researchers to post study results to a public-access Web site, despite objections from leading scientific journals that currently charge nonsubscribers up to $35 for one-time access to view studies.

In 2005, acting on the recommendation of a Congressional advisory committee, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requested that scientists who receive public monies to conduct a study deposit a digital copy of the final manuscript into PubMed Central, the institute’s public-access digital library.

However, a progress report released in February showed that less than 4 percent of researchers have complied with the request, representing just 1,636 submissions out of about 43,000 study manuscripts. This prompted a working group looking into the matter to recommend that the postings be mandated, six to 12 months after a study is published in a peer-reviewed journal. Meanwhile, in December 2005, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduced a bill that would require that researchers report the findings of publicly funded clinical trials within six months of their original publishing, or risk losing funding.

“What's important here is the momentum,” writes Peter Suber, project director of Open Access, a movement dedicated to free access to scientific and scholarly literature, in the March 2 edition of SPARC, the movement’s online newsletter. “Congress asked for a strong policy and NIH delivered a weak one. As evidence mounted that the NIH policy was not meeting its goals, one authoritative body after another asked NIH to strengthen the policy and live up to the original request from Congress.”