A public-access law signed by President Bush on Dec. 26 makes it mandatory for scientists receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health to put a copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts in an online NIH archive, pubmedcentral.com, upon acceptance to a publication.
The manuscripts will then be made available online to the public within 12 months of the work's publication. Scientists who don't submit their manuscripts will risk losing future NIH funding.
The mandate represents a change from the voluntary program enacted by the NIH in 2005. Under that program, only about 5 percent of scientists deposited their manuscripts.
Public access to this research will benefit both the scientific and the nonscientific communities, said Adrienne Martin, a Philosophy professor and bioethicist at Penn.
One major concern of research participants, she said, was that subjects would volunteer but rarely find out the results, especially in projects studying less-severe drug regimens, such as the effects of taking ibuprofen daily.
"Making this available publicly online is a major step forward," she said.
Penn researchers also see benefits for scientists in the online archive.
"The big plus is that if I'm doing a research project, I can do it all online through one simple interface," said Tom Curran, a professor at the School of Medicine.
Low participation rates under the former mandate "were probably what the NIH expected," said Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, a network of academic libraries that worked toward getting the mandate through Congress.
The voluntary participation "was a way to ease in and see what happened," Joseph said.
It also gave the NIH time to correct technical problems and overcome skepticism in the scientific community before broadening the archive's scope, she said.
Most scientists, however, don't view compliance as a problem.
By the time the research must be archived, "everything is already done," Curran said. "It's very easy to make an extra copy of that" and submit it to the database.
Because submission "was just one more thing to do" under the voluntary program, Martin said, participation numbers were low.
"I doubt there were any principled reasons for resisting" among the research community, she said.
The resistance encountered, according to Joseph, came primarily from the journal-publishing industry, especially from for-profit journals.
"They were opposed because it limited ability to make profits," she said, mainly because a free online archive would decrease print-circulation revenue.
Curran said the journals played an important role in both resistance to the database and the archive's viability.
Any database "has to incorporate a business model that lets journals make money," especially because the journals pay for the peer-review process, he said.
At the same time, "the journals have to be part of this so they can put their material in automatically," Curran added.
One journal, The Journal of Clinical Investigation, already automatically puts its articles in PubMed Central.
In fact, "the archive for JCI at PubMed Central also includes everything [published] from 1924 until yesterday," said John Hawley, the executive director at JCI.
Making research available online quickly is becoming more common, according the Arthur Caplan, the director of Penn's Center for Bioethics.
In the time-pressured world of academic research, 12 months is a very long time to wait for free access. Caplan said it's likely the mandate will be shortened to about six months.
And, if set up properly, "this has the potential to truly revolutionize how we use scientific data," Curran said.
