Health researchers back new, free Web archive

[USMCRET6391]

Published: February 4, 2005, 6:41 AM PST
By Reuters

The National Institutes of Health, which spent nearly $20 billion last year funding research, urged scientists on Thursday to let the agency publish their studies on the Internet.

Researchers receiving NIH grants should send their manuscripts to a free, Web-based archive managed by the National Library of Medicine as soon as they can, after first submitting them to medical or scientific journals, NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni said.

"With the rapid growth in the public's use of the Internet, NIH must take a leadership role in making available to the public the research that we support," Zerhouni said.

"Scientists have a right to see the results of their work disseminated as quickly and broadly as possible, and NIH is committed to helping our scientists exercise this right."

The policy is a challenge to scientific journals that usually publish such research.

Journals such as Science, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine sometimes charge thousands of dollars for annual subscriptions but in return subject the studies they publish to an often lengthy process of review and critique.

The NIH, which spent $19.3 billion in 2004 to pay for work done by 212,000 researchers around the world, said taxpayers have a right to see the research they have paid for.

Scientists can ask for a delay of up to one year to protect the profitability of journals, Zerhouni said.

"My goal is to change the landscape of scientific publishing, which is paid for by the public," he told reporters in a telephone briefing.

The NIH estimates that the results of research it supported were described in more than 60,000 published papers in 2003.

The database will be available on PubMed Central's Web site.

Zerhouni said for-profit journals should not be hurt by the policy because only a fraction of the studies they feature are done by NIH-funded researchers.

But there is a move to challenge the big journals. The San Francisco-based Public Library of Science, or PLoS, for example, publishes two free online journals and was backed by former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Harold Varmus.

Disease advocates have complained especially loudly, saying they cannot find information they need without paying fees for an online peek at a study.