The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has sent letters to Francis Collins (Director, National Institutes of Health), John Holdren (Assistant to the President for Science and Technology Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy), and Kathleen Sebelius (Secretary of Health and Human Services U.S . Department of Health and Human Services) regarding the third anniversary of the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy.
Here's an excerpt from the letter to John Holdren :
To build on this achievement, and further enhance the value of the public's annual $60 billion investment in scientific research, we ask that you consider immediately expanding the NIH Public Access Policy to U.S. departments and agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more.
This expansion will provide connections to additional crucial resources that our nation's scientists require to carry out truly comprehensive scientific research in this digital age. With PubMed Central fully operational at the National Library of Medicine, the infrastructure is already in place to help facilitate implementation of an expanded policy, and it's proven to be extremely cost-effective. The NIH estimates that its annual operating costs for the system are about $3.5 million annually—which amounts to only ~1/100th of one percent of its overall annual operating budget.1 This is a small price to pay to ensure that all taxpayers have access to this body of information and increase our collective return on the taxpayer's investment in scientific research.
Economists who have studied the potential impact of providing greater access to publicly funded research outputs on the return on those investments have consistently concluded that economic benefits would be boosted. In a recent study focusing on U.S. R & D expenditures, economists noted that the return on each dollar spent on taxpayer—funded research could be increased by as much as 5% by making the results more broadly available.2 When applied to our annual collective $60 billion dollar investment in scientific research, this represents a significant benefit to the public and the nation's economy.
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