NIH announces new policies
The National Institutes of Health have announced two new policies dealing with conflicts of interest and public access. The first new policy, which was developed to manage financial conflicts of interest among NIH employees, regulates the outside activities, financial holdings and awards of NIH employees. The policy prohibits all NIH employees, whether compensated or uncompensated, from consulting, advisory or other board service. The policy also places restrictions on gifts and awards, as well as self-employment activities (such as product promotion) on behalf of certain industries and organizations. Employees must terminate any prohibited activities within 30 days. The regulations have been published in this week's issue of the Federal Register; comments will be accepted for the next 60 days. The policy guidelines are available at http://www.nih.gov/about/ethics_COI.htm.
In addition, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D., announced the release of the agency's revised and final policy on "public access." The policy requests -- but does not require -- NIH grantees to send to the NIH any research manuscripts accepted for publication in peer reviewed journals. The National Library of Medicine will archive these manuscripts and will post them online at PubMed Central. The NIH will allow authors themselves to specify when their manuscripts should be made publicly available -- up to 12 months -- after publication. Dr. Zerhouni said that the decision to defer to authors on the timing of public release and other modifications to the original proposal (published in the Sept. 17 Federal Register) were made to encourage broad participation in the program. The final policy becomes effective on May 2.
Annual medical school faculty salary report available
The AAMC 2003-2004 "Report on Medical School Faculty Salaries" is now available. This publication is the AAMC's 40th review of full-time faculty compensation. The report includes 33 tables that present the total compensation attributable to teaching, patient care, or research for more than 77,000 full-time medical school faculty. The report uses fiscal year 2004 data from all 125 U.S. medical schools and covers all sources of compensation: fixed/base salary, medical practice supplement, bonus/incentive pay and uncontrolled outside earnings. For more information, please visit http://www.aamc.org/publications.