Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy

I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

To be clear, maximum transparency regarding the research we support is our default position. Since the release of NIH’s 2008 Public Access Policy, more than 1.5 million articles reporting on NIH-supported research have been made freely available to the public through PubMed Central. While the 2008 Policy allowed for an up to 12-month delay before such articles were required to be made publicly available, in 2024, NIH revised the Public Access Policy to remove the embargo period so that researchers, students, and members of the public have rapid access to these findings.

NIH is the crown jewel of the American biomedical research system.  However, a recent Pew Research Center study shows that only about 25% of Americans have a “great deal of confidence” that scientists are working for the public good.  Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans.   

Providing speedy public access to NIH-funded results is just one of the ways we are working to earn back the trust of the American people. Trust in science is an essential element in Making America Healthy Again.  As such, NIH and its research partners will continue to promote maximum transparency in all that we do.    

Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, National Institutes of Health