The Influence of the National Institutes of Health Public-Access Policy on the Publishing Habits of Principal Investigators

Introduction

On April 7, 2008, the previously voluntary National Institutes of Health (NIH) publicaccess policy became mandatory, requesting that the NIH-funded principal investigators (PIs) submit to PubMed Central (PMC) immediately upon publication the peer-reviewed copy of their article, which will then become available for public access through PMC no later than after a twelve-month embargo period.

Research Questions

The questions this dissertation attempted to answer are:

1. Which factors motivate the NIH-funded PIs to publish in the PLoS open-access journals?

2. How do NIH-funded PIs perceive the NIH public-access policy? 

3. How does the NIH public-access policy influence the PIs’ publishing behavior?

4. How does the NIH public-access policy influence the PIs’ decision to publish in

open-access journals?

 

Methods

During the period March-May 2011, fortytwo NIH-funded PIs who had published in one of the PLoS journals during the period 2005-2009 and who were affiliated with thirty-two academic institutions, research centers and hospitals around the United States were interviewed using SkypeTM software. A random sampling from the RePORTER database was used for the selection of the participants. The participants were divided into two categories; the pre-mandate, who published in PLoS journals before the mandatory policy and the post-mandate, who published for the first time in one of the PLoS journals after the policy. During the interviews, a semi-structured interview protocol was followed, in which the PIs were asked to answer thirteen open-ended questions.

Discussion

From the pre-mandate participants (N=42, n=15) only five PIs were self-characterized as open-access advocates. From the postmandate participants (N=42, n=27) the open-access advocates totaled fourteen. The data revealed that the vast majority of the PIs are not influenced by the NIH public-access policy in their publication preferences. Since a large number of journals comply with the terms of the policy, the PIs choose where they will publish their papers based on the journal quality, impact factor, readership, wide and fast article dissemination and quality of the work.

 

Poster presented at the Berlin9 conference, Washington DC, November 9-10, 2011