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Starting July 1, Academic Publishers Can't Paywall NIH-Funded Research (x.com) 51

An anonymous reader writes: NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has announced that the NIH Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1. From Bhattacharya's announcement: NIH is the crown jewel of the American biomedical research system. However, a recent Pew Research Center study shows that only about 25% of Americans have a "great deal of confidence" that scientists are working for the public good. Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans.

Providing speedy public access to NIH-funded results is just one of the ways we are working to earn back the trust of the American people. Trust in science is an essential element in Making America Healthy Again. As such, NIH and its research partners will continue to promote maximum transparency in all that we do.

Starting July 1, Academic Publishers Can't Paywall NIH-Funded Research

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  • I spent a lot of time in academia. I did undergrad and post-undergrad research. I was a grad student for far too long working on my PhD. I was a post-doc for several years after that, and a research associate after that. I know how the sausage is made.

    You'll be hard pressed to find a researcher who favors paywalls. The problem is many of the most prestigious journals use them. This leads to a chicken-and-egg problem for researchers, as they either get their best work in the paywalled journals - where it gets read by more people - or they put it into less prestigious journals that are not paywalled. For years there was no choice; it was paywalled or less read.

    The new regulation says that the previously paywalled journals have to make an open access option available for NIH funded research. This is a great thing. The publishers will still get publication fees, but they can't force readers to pay additional fees. Whether journals should be so expensive to publish in - and subscribe to - is another question, but at least readers will have access to more published work at no direct cost.

    But make no mistake about it. The paywalls existed to generate revenue for the journals, the scientists themselves never favored them. As someone who spent quite a bit of time at a smaller research university (with fewer journal subscriptions available through our library) I know the frustration of not being able to get some journal articles due to paywalls.
    • I've wondered about this in the past when reading about journals (broadly). Aren't they a leftover from Victorian England (or before), when there class system was at it's worst? I've thought that governments and/or international organizations e.g. WHO, etc should take over their role. I mean what great purpose do they serve. From what I read there was a large fraud issue around 2020 where about 30 percent of published studies where somehow fallacious or fraudulent. I think it's much better now (correct me i
    • by cstacy ( 534252 )

      You'll be hard pressed to find a researcher who favors paywalls. As someone who spent quite a bit of time at a smaller research university (with fewer journal subscriptions available through our library) I know the frustration of not being able to get some journal articles due to paywalls.

      This man is 100% correct and true.

      I spent decades doing research at MIT (DARPA funded) and Harvard Medical School (NIH funded). I had access to any journal I desired. Everybody I know hates/ed journal paywalls, even if it didn't affect us personally.

  • by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @09:21AM (#65344269)
    Old William Proxmire had an award he handed out every so often called "The Golden Fleece" based on his lampooning what he called waste of money research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Some of this was funny, but so easy to take out of context.

    I have no issues with research being publicly available, however, will everyone know how to process the sometimes hard to digest work? A lot of it can be seriously obscure, even for those of us who do research for a living.

    Imagine "the public" making informed and accurate assessments on " The effects of amalayze 32 inhibitions while promoting dihedral versions of oxyribonase accumulation in sperm differentiualization for optimal leukocyte production in type O reactions." (completely made up stuff here)

    • by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Imagine "the public" making informed and accurate assessments on " The effects of amalayze 32 inhibitions while promoting dihedral versions of oxyribonase accumulation in sperm differentiualization for optimal leukocyte production in type O reactions." (completely made up stuff here)

      You should get a job as an LLM.
      On the Internet, nobody knows you're a human!

  • by Raisey-raison ( 850922 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @09:33AM (#65344289)

    If taxpayers already paid for the research, they shouldn't have to pay twice. Making the research publicly available is an excellent idea.

    • Sounds good to me :) , I said in another post, but too me government and/or international organizations could take over publishing. I'm no expert, but journals are a leftover that doesn't make sense anymore, from what I understand. Still, my knowledge on this is quite limited. So, I would love to hear opinions from scientist, and researchers. I would love to understand better the flow and sharing of research.
  • Trump has one clever trick to enforce this policy...

    In slashdot tradition:

    1. 1) Cut all funding to NIH.
    2. 2) No funding means there won't be any funded research to paywall!
    3. 3) ...
    4. 4) Profit!
  • This is kind of pointless now since Trump/Musk cancelled most NIH research.
    The US won't be producing any research. All of the good researchers are fleeing to Europe and Canada.
    The rest are working at McDonalds.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- Albert Einstein

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