Objectives: The new mandate from the White House Office of Science Technology and Policy promises big changes in scholarly communication. Within the next four years, peer-reviewed papers from all federally-funded projects will need to be made publicly accessible in a designated repository at the time of their publication. As speculation builds about what this will mean for authors and publishers, the question remains of exactly how much of the biomedical literature will be subject to this mandate. This study attempts to address this question.
Methods: This study centers on searches of the PubMed database. PubMed has broad coverage of the biomedical literature with a particular emphasis on items pertaining to clinical medicine. As PubMed is compiled and maintained by the National Library of Medicine, a U.S. Government agency, records there often contain relevant information about government funding. Using the “Funding Support (Grant) Information in MEDLINE/PubMed” search strategies (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/funding_support.html), this study seeks to identify the proportion of government-supported items in PubMed for a number of different topics. Searches are repeated using publication date limits of ten years andi five years to ascertain if these results follow a chronological trend.
Results: Initial results confirm that a significant portion of PubMed items would have been subject to the OSTP mandate, as approximately 11% of all PubMed records appear to be funded with federal monies. The proportion of government-funded items returned by individual PubMed searches varies dramatically, from only around 1% of items for the MeSH headings “Venereology”, “Anesthesiology“ and “Osteopathic Medicine'” to around 27% of of items with the publication type of “Clinical Trial, Phase I”. Most notably, a search using one hedge designed to find items published about or by authors based in the United States would seem to indicate that a full 40% of such items ultimately derive from federally funded projects. Changes over time in the percentage of government funded items varied between searches, in some cases decreasing, while increasing in others. For example, the percentage of federally funded items retrieved using the very broad MeSH heading “Diseases” doubled from 5% in all years to nearly 11% for the last ten.
Conclusions: These findings make clear that making federally-funded articles publicly available at the time of publication will have a significant impact on access to the biomedical literature by the general public. The large proportion of items pertaining to such broad categories as “clinical trials” or “behavioral medicine” that will soon be covered by the OSTP mandate means that non open access publishers of such items may well have to examine their operations going forward.