Inside FRPAA: The Voluntary Experiment
Advances in technology, combined with a desire for researchers to broaden the impact and scope of their work, and the public outcry for access to research funded from their own pockets have spurred advances in open access to federally funded research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose $28 billion budget accounts for one-third of all federal dollars spent on research and which funds an estimated 65,000 peer-reviewed journal articles each year, adopted an open access policy in May of 2005. The NIH policy requests and strongly encourages all investigators to make NIH-funded research available to other scientists and the public through the NIH National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) database immediately
after the final date of peer-reviewed journal publication. The NIH has developed a password protected, Web-based NIH manuscript submission system that requires a simple uploading of a PDF version of final manuscripts;
however, only 3 percent of researchers have participated in this program.
It is unclear why the NIH’s voluntary submission policy did not work, particularly since it was created by a balanced panel of publishers, scientists, patient advocates, scientific associations, and other organizations in conjunction
with the NIH’s director, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni. Advocates of the NIH’s policy quickly realized that the voluntary submission process may need to be mandatory in order to serve the research community and reach the Institute’s open access goals.
In May of this year, one year after the voluntary deposit experiment was launched with little success, Senators Cornyn and Lieberman introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill that would have federal agencies require grant recipients to publish their papers--online and free--within six months of their publication elsewhere.
Sources:
National Institutes of Health. Open Access Policy. 29 September 2006 <http://publicaccess.nih.gov>.
Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Key Advisory Group Reaffirms that NIH Public Access Policy Should Be 6 Months and Mandatory. Alliance for Taxpayer Access Press Release. 13 April 2006 <http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/Release06-0413.html.>.