Taxpayer Access: The NIH Public Access Policy

September 30, 2008 · Filed Under policy issues · 3 Comments 

Every year, the U.S. federal government funds more than $29 billion in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The research, which inspires about 80,000 individual articles (each year), is then published in journals that only subscribers can access. Doctors, scientists, patients, taxpayers, and health professionals are unable to access NIH-funded research without paying access fees that can reach $30 per article or over $23,000 for an institutional yearly subscription.

“Taxpayer access” – the principle that American taxpayers should have free, timely, public access to the results of publicly funded research – would change this, and put critical biomedical research into the hands of those who need it.

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