NIH Speeds Up Implementation of New Public Access Policy

The National Institutes of Health is accelerating a Biden-era plan to make its research findings freely and quickly available to the public, the agency announced Wednesday.

The 2024 Public Access Policy was set to take effect Dec. 31, 2025, but will now take effect July 1 of this year. It updates the 2008 Public Access Policy, which allowed for a 12-month delay before research articles were required to be made publicly available. The 2024 policy removed the embargo period so that researchers, students and members of the public have rapid access to these findings, according to the announcement. 

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, who took over last month, said the move is aimed at continuing “to promote maximum transparency” and rebuilding public confidence in scientists, which has waned in recent years. 

“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,” Bhattacharya said in the memo. “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.”

Although the scientific research community is supportive of the policy itself, some are calling on the NIH to reinstate the original implementation date to give researchers time to effectively comply with this and other new agency regulations. 

“This new effective date will impose extra burdens on researchers and their institutions to meet the deadline,” Matt Owens, president of COGR, which represents research institutions, said in a statement Wednesday. “Ironically, at the same time NIH is accelerating implementation of this policy, the agency is adding new burdensome certification and financial reporting requirements for grant recipients. This runs counter to the administration’s efforts to reduce regulations.”