Two years after the White House issued its memo onExpanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” we now have the second of the more than twenty policies to be announced (the first, from the Department of Energy [DOE] came out last August). The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has posted their policy for public access to research papers and to research data, and their approach differs significantly from that of the DOE. Some first impressions below…
For access to research papers based on their funding, the AHRQ will follow the path already blazed by the NIH. Though the NIH has not officially announced a policy, representatives have stated that their PubMed Central (PMC) repository fulfills the White House’s requirements for research papers and will be their method of complying. Given that the NIH is required to use and maintain PMC by separate law, this is not surprising.
Many of the medical and health-related funding agencies are expected to take advantage of PMC for their own public access policies. The AHRQ will require funded authors to deposit their accepted article manuscripts to PMC, to be made publicly accessible after an embargo period of no more than 12 months after publication. It’s interesting to hear the AHRQ describe PMC, a public service of the National Library of Medicine, as a “private-public partnership”. It would be interesting to hear who they think the “private” partners are.
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