For more than a year, the National Institutes of Health has wrestled with two thorny issues: lack of public access to federally funded research and drug company payments to staff scientists. In February both issues were resolved.
Open access. Traditionally, academic journals hold all rights to scientific papers they publish. But with subscription prices of some journals reaching into the thousands and individual articles often selling for $25, critics have argued that access is prohibitive for libraries and researchers as well as civilians. After months of fending off complaints that publishers were profiting unduly from tax-funded research, the NIH reached a compromise. The agency will now require that scientists voluntarily post all federally funded research on the institute’s free-access Web site, www.pubmed.com, within 12 months, not the 6 months originally proposed. Publishers say they can live with the compromise. “This is a reasonable outcome,” said John Regazzi, spokesman for Reed ...
