Mandating Access: Assessing the NIH's Public Access Policy

Staudt, Joseph (2017): Mandating Access: Assessing the NIH's Public Access Policy.

Abstract

In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated that the full text of NIH-supported articles be made freely available on PubMed Central (PMC) -- the largest and most commonly used repository of biomedical literature. This paper examines how this "PMC mandate" impacted publishing patterns in biomedicine and researcher access to the biomedical literature. Using ~1 million NIH articles and several matched comparison samples, I find that NIH articles are more likely to be published in traditional subscription-based journals (as opposed to "open access" journals) after the mandate. This indicates that the mandate did not induce widespread discrimination, by subscription-based journals, against NIH articles. I also find that the mandate did not increase the number of forward citations to NIH articles published in subscription-based journals. This is consistent with researchers having widespread access to the biomedical literature prior to the mandate, leaving little room for the mandate to increase access.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: economics of science, open access, nih, nih public access policy, policy evaluation
• Subjects: O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O3 - Innovation ; Research and Development ; Technological Change ; Intellectual Property Rights > O31 - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O3 - Innovation ; Research and Development ; Technological Change ; Intellectual Property Rights > O34 - Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O3 - Innovation ; Research and Development ; Technological Change ; Intellectual Property Rights > O38 - Government Policy

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