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The article discusses a medical research plan proposed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Seven months after the NIH proposed an ambitious policy to offer free access to medical research, the final policy, left the issue pretty much where it started. The draft policy would have required authors to deposit their final papers in the NIH's PubMed Central database for access within six months; now, the process is merely voluntary. The policy "requests" that NIH-funded scientists submit an electronic version of their final manuscripts, defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, in PubMed Central "as soon as possible, and within 12 months of final publication.

The article presents the second part in a series of papers which examine the influence of bias on audiology and speech language pathology research in the U.S. Scientists have developed controls for minimizing bias and accounting for their effects. However, in an era of evidence-based practice, clinicians should recognize that their clinical expectancies can cloud their judgments about a treatment's outcome.

The article reports on the launch of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) on January 9, 2007. UKPMC is the British version of the U.S. National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central. It will provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences. The service is the product of work done by the Wellcome Trust to encourage British research-funding bodies to promote and encourage open access publishing. A special manuscript-submission system has been also introduced to let scientists submit articles that have been accepted in a peer-reviewed journal directly to UKPMC.