Monday, January 18, 2010

Calculating compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy

If your journal publishes articles that benefit from NIH research and you would like to know how your journal would rate on compliance, following is my search method:

From PubMed, go to Advanced Search.
At the first drop-down menu, select Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural [pt]
Under Journal, enter your Journal's title
Under Publication Date, enter:
Either: full NIH policy period: 2005/01/01 to [one year prior minus one day]
Or: mandatory NIH policy period: 2008/04/07 to [one year prior minus one day]

Note that either publication date period is an estimate, as the policy date reflects dating of research grants rather than dating of publications. There are other possible approaches to calculating this data; from a methodological viewpoint, using more than one approach and triangulating is optimal. Comments on the method are appreciated; please contact hgmorris at sfu dot ca

The Dramatic Growth of Open Access uses the full NIH policy period, at least up to Dec. 31, 2009. Full details of the search strategy used in DGOA are published in the open data edition (see the 3rd sheet).