The NIH public access policy did not harm biomedical journals

The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) imposed a public access policy on all publications for which the research was supported by their grants; the policy was drafted in 2004 and took effect in 2008. The policy is now 11 years old, yet no analysis has been presented to assess whether in fact this largest-scale US-based public access policy affected the vitality of the scholarly publishing enterprise, as manifested in changed mortality or natality rates of biomedical journals. We show here that implementation of the NIH policy was associated with slightly elevated mortality rates and mildly depressed natality rates of biomedical journals, but that birth rates so exceeded death rates that numbers of biomedical journals continued to rise, even in the face of the implementation of such a sweeping public access policy.