New NIH's policy: good news for Pubget users

As you may have heard by now, the National Institutes of Health instituted a new policy earlier this month that requires that any paper that was supported by NIH funding has to be available to the public for free within a year after publication. (For those who don't know, the NIH is the single biggest source of funding for biomedical research in the United States.)

For Pubget users, this is good news: it means you can get more PDFs. It is especially nice for users whose institutions don't have large library holdings, since it means they will now have access to more science than ever before.

So how do you get the new PDFs on Pubget? Easy—the same way you got PDFs on Pubget before. Just do a Pubget search. If the PDF's available, you'll see it (or else let us know). If not, you'll see the abstract and links, just like you've always seen for papers you don't have access to.

Still, remember that NIH-supported papers don't have to go public for a whole year. That means if you want to get the latest PDFs on Pubget, getting your institution supported is still your best bet (more on that later).

It's important not to dismiss the honest work that publishers put in in adding value to the science, but we've heard from a lot of people about this, and the consensus is folks are happy. They figure it was people's tax dollars that paid to do the science, so it's only fair for people to be able to read about it.