Mandating Access: Assessing the NIH's Public Access Policy

Joseph Staudt

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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.

Keywords: economics of science; open access; nih; nih public access policy; policy evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O34 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Mandating access: assessing the NIH’s public access policy (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:82981

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