In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) instituted a Public Access Policy that requires recipients of NIH funding to make all resulting peer-reviewed journal articles publicly accessible within a year of publication. This amounts to an estimated 88,000 articles annually, with similar policies in other countries leading to a significant increase in public access to biomedical research. This study assesses whether physician and community health organization access to published research can be expected to make a difference in the services they provide.
Intellectual Merit: The sample for the study involves two professional communities, physicians and community health organization (CHO) staff. The approach taken is to enroll a sample of 300 physicians in a yearlong Randomized Controlled Trial that measures information-seeking behaviors in clinical and other settings. The experimental group has access to the journal collection of Stanford University Library, as a proxy of future public access and a point-of-care research summary service (UpToDate). The control group has access to UpToDate, as well as the current level of public access, principally to article abstracts and that proportion of articles that are open access (20%). The second phase surveys 50 CHO staff on their research use and information skills. Those who opt for training in using PubMed are provided with yearlong access to Stanford's journal collection.
Participants are then debriefed about their research use, and a secondary analysis determines demographic, technical, and training factors that affect information access and utilization. This study brings a high standard of evidence to bear on assessing how professionals discover, access, and utilize research in clinical and public health practice, as well as for personal development. The study demonstrates the value of mixed methods research by combining the results of both gold-standard precision (re: use of research in practice over time) and detailed qualitative understanding (re: how research is used). The findings should inform policy initiatives in areas of information access and literacy, evidence-based medicine (EBM), and medical education, while the inclusion of CHOs increases their relevance to the healthcare needs of underrepresented groups.
Broader impact: The NIH Public Access Policy is part of a broader international "opening" of science (e.g., open access, open source software, open data, open educational resources). This has led to Congressional initiatives to extend the policy across government agencies, as well as to pushback that would curtail any such initiatives. Thus, the need to assess the value of such access to health care providers to see if it has the potential to contribute to evidence-based care, a higher quality of treatment, and reduced health-care costs through the use of the latest research. At issue is whether public and professional access to federally funded research has the potential to improve the practices of related bodies of professionals, as this has a bearing on the spread of such policies, the design and delivery of such information, the curriculum in medical education, information literacy education in other professions, and expectations for the public use of online information more broadly.
