Tuesday, March 3, 2015

HHS Releases Public Access Plans for 5 Agencies

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a comprehensive set of plans outlining the steps that its five largest Agencies will take to create policies expanding public access to the results of their funded research.  The policies are expected to go into effect by the end of this year.

The HHS release includes plans to update existing policies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as plans for new policies at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).  Additionally, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) is also voluntarily developing a plan for its portfolio of funded research.

Because each Agency created a separate plan, there is a lot of information packed into this single release. The plans relating to articles are relatively homogenous across the five Agencies;  all five will use the NIH Manuscript Submission System to deposit articles into the PubMed Central database, which will serve as the focal point for compliance.  

Of particular note: the discussion of HHS’s proposed mechanism to allow stakeholders to petition to change the embargo period centers on providing mechanisms to shorten the embargo period, underscoring that in all cases, across all operating divisions, the 12-month embargo is a guideline, and the rights holder can set an embargo period of less than that at any time.

Also of note is that while the individual Agencies indicate that their copyright and license provisions will be aligned with currently those in use by PubMed Central,  the NIH plan contains language which points to a possible shift in the Agency’s thinking on this crucial element.  The NIH plan notes: that the Agency is exploring the possibility of using the government use license specified to help make papers public. Such a move would greatly expand the utility of articles in the PMC database. 

The HHS blueprint for the sharing of digital research data are not as tightly defined as the plans to deal with research articles.  In particular, unlike in the article arena, HHS does not have a common repository for research data -- though it is envisioned that ultimately the operating divisions will utilize the health.gov portal to serve as the mechanism for the public to locate and access HHS-funded research data sets.  

This does not indicate a lack of commitment on the part of the department to move towards making the open sharing of research data a priority. Researchers across all HHS Agencies  will be required to provide plans for data access and sharing as part of the grant proposal process, or explain why their data cannot or should not be shared -- effectively setting a new default mode for sharing research data across HHS.

With the five operating divisions in different states of readiness, HHS's strategy for proceeding with data policy development is by necessity, quite pragmatic. The Department will first conduct an assessment of data holdings across its agencies, and create an enterprise-wide data inventory. It will also create common metadata elements for use by all of its agencies. 

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