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Washington Update
*Researchers who are wholly
or partly funded by the National Institutes of Health may soon be subject
to new open-access publication rules, under
a proposed Public Access Policy released by NIH on Sept. 3. The policy
would ask NIH-funded researchers to provide an electronic copy of their
peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication to place in NIH’s
digital archive, PubMed Central. Six months after publication, the scientific
article would be freely available to the public. The proposed policy
comes in response to congressional debate on open-access publication
of all federally funded research (see HABIT, October 28, 2003). For more
information on the policy, go here. *The 108th Congress returned for its lame-duck session in November to pass the remaining FY 2005 appropriation bills, including funding for NIH and the National Science Foundation. For NIH, the final budget number comes in at $28.6 billion, 2 percent above last year’s funding level. NSF will suffer a nearly 2 percent cut in its FY 2005 budget, receiving only $5.5 billion in this year’s final appropriations. To read more about research and development appropriations across all federal agencies for 2005, go here. To track the progress of the FY 2005 appropriations bills, go here. *The Bush administration’s proposal to require electronic medical record use by all doctors and hospitals within 10 years is severely underfunded, according to a new report by the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute. The $100 million proposed for health information technology in the President’s FY 2005 budget is “is a teaspoon of the funding needed to digitize a $1.6 trillion industry,” the report concludes. To read more about President Bush’s plans for improving health care during his second term, go here. (The report is free, but registration is required.) *On Nov. 12, HHS announced $24.1 million in 2004 grants to support health disparities research and the elimination of health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities and medically underserved communities. The awards were made through NIH’s National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities to academic centers, community outreach partners and individual health professionals. *Intramural scientists at NIH are protesting proposed changes in NIH rules that forbid those scientists from receiving honoraria from institutions that receive NIH funding, according to a Nov. 15 report in Science magazine. More than 170 intramural scientists signed the protest letter sent to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, saying the new rule would restrict academic freedom and keep NIH from recruiting and retaining top-level scientists. *David A. Schwartz, M.D., was named the new director for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program on Oct. 25. Dr. Schwartz, formerly of Duke University, is an expert in environmental lung disease. He replaces Kenneth Olden, Ph.D., NIEHS Director since 1991. |
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