How Biden’s Equitable Access to Research Will Impact Healthcare

September 19, 2022 - On August 25, 2022, the Biden administration announced its plans to ensure equitable access to research. Outlined in the press release are the administration’s intentions to make all federally funded research free and accessible by removing the paywalls, which present a barrier to access. This new plan will amend previous regulations formed under the Obama Administration, which allowed paywalls on federally funded research for up to one year. Ariel Katz, CEO of H1, a global healthcare data provider, sat down with PharmaNewsIntelligence explain how the Biden administration’s order for equitable access to research will impact healthcare.

Who Funds Medical Research?

To preface, it is crucial to understand how this ruling changes early access to research. As previously mentioned, under the Obama Administration’s order, federally funded studies could remain behind a paywall for up to 1 year.

Although that is the case, some organizations have already widened access to research. In Europe, Plan S was launched as an initiative to make research articles open access.

“Back before this new ruling, 99% of life sciences from company research decided to make their research open access,” explained Katz. “If Genentech or Pfizer published something, they already took the stance years ago, saying it's open access — anyone can read it for free. These companies want people to read it, which is great. The research that Biden will affect is academic research and everything in between,” he added.

Katz explains that this is research the public already funds, meaning it should have always been open access.

Katz told PharmaNewsIntelligence, “it's shocking it took this long. The general public that pays taxes may not understand that the government spends 40 billion dollars a year funding medical research through the NIH. That tax-payer funded research then gets published, and the public can't read it. What’s been happening is such an absurd system, so it's great to see this policy change.”

Who Will be Most Impacted by Open Access?

While many wealthy institutions and their affiliates already have access to the resources required to view research articles behind a paywall, this availability is not universal. The impacts of this research will go beyond those existing institutions.

Individual Patients and Patient Populations

“This impacts the mother whose child gets diagnosed with a rare disease and Googles that rare disease, finds a potentially helpful publication, and has to pay $39.50 to access it. Meanwhile, her taxpayer dollars already paid for that research.”

 “It’s not going to impact people that are already doing research in many cases. But because these publishers have been making millions off of selling their articles, these new plans will impact the general public more than academic researchers. This was a long time coming,” Katz told PharmaNewsIntelligence.

In addition to the individual patients it may benefit, this new standard of equitable access to research will drastically impact low- and middle-income patient populations.

Katz emphasized this by saying, “the group that it benefits most are the low- and middle-income families, underrepresented citizens who don't have money to pay to read the research. It is insane that this still is true in 2022. It affects more of that segment of population than the segment of research. From the research perspective, it will have high tide rises on all boats. It’s hard to say which research area will be more affected, but the affected people will be a segment of it.”

Researchers and Clinicians

Additionally, he emphasized the potential for improving global access to research and scientific information.

“It will empower a segment of the scientific community. Someone who works at the University of Michigan, University of Alabama, or Pfizer already has access to this via their institutions. Someone trying to be an early career scientist in Kenya or Albania who might not have an institution paying half a million dollars a year to get access to paywall science will now have access to it. It’s further democratizing scientific information and scientific discourse to areas of the world. The US is fairly saturated already with who has access, from a scientific perspective,” he highlighted.

What Are the Impacts of Open Access?

Although the impacts of this new ruling are extensive, Katz summarized the benefits: “It's going to make a more informed populous and a more informed citizen base, allowing more patients to take control over their healthcare.”

Patient Empowerment

In his discussion with PharmaNewsIntelligence, Katz outlined how this ruling will impact patient empowerment.

“We're going to see patients take a lot more into their own hands. This is already happening, and new equitable access to research will only increase it. The public will see more integration of these articles into apps on our phones, computer, or access where patients would be looking. It’ll be more clinical and available, where before it couldn't have been because most services were behind a paywall,” he said

Fact-Checking

Additionally, Katz says, “when CNN links to a research article, the public couldn't read it without paying. Nobody's going to pay $40. Now, it's free and available, allowing science to be more interwoven into our day-to-day lives.”

Health Equity

“It’s amazing for health equity and improving access. People say healthcare is a basic human right. Now it's going to be access to healthcare information is a basic human right,” he noted. “This is going to impact people that don't have a voice, that don't have money, that are low- and middle-income families, and that are from low- and middle-income countries. This doesn't affect someone who works at Harvard.”

The Publishers

Despite assumptions, Katz does not believe that the impact on the publishing industry will be significant enough to cause concern or reverse the change.

He told PharmaNewsIntelligence, “if you look at the stock price the day that this was announced, the stock wasn't down much. Most knew this was going to happen — it was a question of when, not if, it had to happen, and most were already diversifying their resources.”

When asked about the impacts on what kinds of research will be accepted for publication, Katz said he doesn’t predict publishers will change what kind of research is accepted, but "people will see more consolidation across the publishing industry for journals that can't diversify their business model past paywalls. It’s going to short term hurt certain publishers, but it's so much better for the long term. Many big publishers already knew this change was happening, and it's included into their stock price.”

Looking Ahead

Katz concluded that, because of this new ruling by the Biden administration, “Europe and China have no choice but to do this, too. It would seem so backward. The US did this and took the hit on businesses, knowing this change was better for the world.”

As this change is implemented and other countries around the world follow suit, the hope is that this change will facilitate an improved and equitable research and healthcare system. Globally, patients and researchers are hopeful about the beneficial outcomes that this change will bring forth.