Expanding Access, Improving Health

Guest post by Kathryn Funk, program manager for NLM’s PubMed Central.

Last week, National Library Week celebrated how libraries and library workers make our communities stronger. In the spirit of building strong communities, NLM has committed to “democratiz[ing] access to the products and processes of scientific research.”

NLM delivers on that commitment by supporting the NIH Public Access Policy. This policy, passed by Congress in 2008, requires authors funded by NIH to make publicly accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) any peer-reviewed paper accepted for publication. Now, over a decade after the NIH Public Access Policy went in to effect, PMC makes more than 1 million NIH-funded papers available to the research community and the public. This volume of publicly accessible, NIH-funded papers represents a clear return on investment for the public, but numbers alone don’t provide the full story.

A quick dive into NIH Research Matters, a weekly update of NIH research highlights, offers a much richer and more personal picture of how the NIH Public Access Policy and NLM’s support of it can strengthen and empower communities. Making NIH-funded papers publicly accessible in PMC means that the public has free and direct access to research that touches on some of the most critical public health concerns facing our community, including studies that:

• Suggest a method for detecting breast tumors earlier and more often, creating a higher chance of survival for patients (NIH Research Matters | PMC);
• Identify treatment options for reducing the risk of death for people who’d previously had a non-fatal opioid overdose (NIH Research Matters | PMC);
• Explore how maternal nutrition supplements can increase infant birth size and potentially improve children’s life-long health (NIH Research Matters | PMC);
• Identify young people with suicidal thoughts by using machine learning to analyze brain images (NIH Research Matters | PMC);
• Gauge exercise’s impact on the growth of new nerve cells in the brains of mice, which could potentially reduce memory problems in people with Alzheimer’s disease (NIH Research Matters | PMC); and
• Develop blood tests to detect signs of eight common types of cancer (NIH Research Matters | PMC).

These examples illustrate that access, while essential, is not the Library’s end goal. Improved health is.

NLM supports public access to research outputs to accelerate scientific discovery and advance the health of individuals and our communities. It is the best way we can honor the investment made by the American people in scientific research and the surest way to make our communities stronger.

Kathryn Funk is the program manager for PubMed Central. She is responsible for PMC policy as well as PMC’s role in supporting the public access policies of numerous funding agencies, including NIH. Katie received her master’s degree in library and information science from The Catholic University of America.