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The NIH public access policy did not harm biomedical journals

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  • A Townsend Peterson
  • Paul E Johnson
  • Narayani Barve
  • Ada Emmett
  • Marc L Greenberg
  • Josh Bolick
  • Huijie Qiao

Abstract

The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) imposed a public access policy on all publications for which the research was supported by their grants; the policy was drafted in 2004 and took effect in 2008. The policy is now 11 years old, yet no analysis has been presented to assess whether in fact this largest-scale US-based public access policy affected the vitality of the scholarly publishing enterprise, as manifested in changed mortality or natality rates of biomedical journals. We show here that implementation of the NIH policy was associated with slightly elevated mortality rates and mildly depressed natality rates of biomedical journals, but that birth rates so exceeded death rates that numbers of biomedical journals continued to rise, even in the face of the implementation of such a sweeping public access policy.This Perspective article analyzes whether the US National Institutes of Health open access policy, which from 2008 forced open access on thousands of papers, had a detectable effect on the "demography" of biomedical journals.

Suggested Citation

  • A Townsend Peterson & Paul E Johnson & Narayani Barve & Ada Emmett & Marc L Greenberg & Josh Bolick & Huijie Qiao, 2019. "The NIH public access policy did not harm biomedical journals," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(10), pages 1-7, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pbio00:3000352
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000352
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    4. Liu, Meijun & Hu, Xiao & Wang, Yuandi & Shi, Dongbo, 2018. "Survive or perish: Investigating the life cycle of academic journals from 1950 to 2013 using survival analysis methods," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 344-364.
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    Cited by:

    1. Qianjin Zong & Zhihong Huang & Jiaru Huang, 2023. "Can open access increase LIS research’s policy impact? Using regression analysis and causal inference," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(8), pages 4825-4854, August.

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