SUMMARY

In April 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented the Public Access Policy (PAP), which mandated that the full text of NIH-supported articles be made freely available on PubMed Central – the NIH’s repository of biomedical research. This paper uses 600,000 NIH articles and a matched comparison sample to examine how the PAP impacted researcher access to the biomedical literature and publishing patterns in biomedicine. Though some estimates allow for large citation increases after the PAP, the most credible estimates suggest that the PAP had a relatively modest effect on citations, which is consistent with most researchers having widespread access to the biomedical literature prior to the PAP, leaving little room to increase access. I also find that NIH articles are more likely to be published in traditional subscription-based journals (as opposed to ‘open access’ journals) after the PAP. This indicates that any discrimination the PAP induced, by subscription-based journals against NIH articles, was offset by other factors – possibly the decisions of editors and submission behaviour of authors.

中文翻译：

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强制访问：评估 NIH 的公共访问政策

概括

2008 年 4 月，美国国立卫生研究院 (NIH) 实施了公共访问政策 (PAP)，该政策要求 NIH 支持的文章全文可在 PubMed Central（NIH 的生物医学研究资料库）上免费提供。本文使用 600,000 篇 NIH 文章和匹配的比较样本来检查 PAP 如何影响研究人员获取生物医学文献和生物医学出版模式。尽管一些估计允许在 PAP 之后引用大量增加，但最可信的估计表明 PAP 对引用的影响相对较小，这与大多数研究人员在 PAP 之前广泛访问生物医学文献的情况一致，几乎没有空间增加访问。我还发现，在 PAP 之后，NIH 的文章更有可能发表在传统的订阅期刊（而不是“开放获取”期刊）上。这表明 PAP 由订阅期刊对 NIH 文章引起的任何歧视都被其他因素抵消了——可能是编辑的决定和作者的提交行为。