Doctors’ lobbyists in Washington tend to focus their energies on ensuring Medicare pays well, and on issues like so-called scope of practice laws. But in the early aughts, the American Medical Association had a surprising new focus: PubMed Central.
The National Institutes of Health was on the verge of enacting a policy that would require any publications resulting from NIH-funded research be posted on the government-owned PubMed Central publication repository so the American public could access the research their taxes had funded. The change wouldn’t hurt most physicians — if anything, it might help them too. But the American Medical Association publishes a research journal, JAMA, that requires a paid subscription and returns millions of dollars to the AMA every year. It and other scientific publishers saw the change as a destabilizing threat to their business models, the tides of journal subscription fees slowly receding from the shoreline.
Whether from their lobbying or others, that first policy only forced researchers to make their work free after 12 months. But even back then, the AMA predicted further federal movement on the issue would need “careful monitoring, because it would represent the beginning of a broader movement.”