Addressing Leavitt as well as NIH indirectly, members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access emphasized the need to hold NIH accountable for achieving the stated goals of sharing taxpayer-funded research with the American people and fulfilling the intentions behind the original Congressional mandate. They called on HHS to report to Congress and the public in the near term on progress toward full taxpayer access using two practical metrics:

1. The proportion of eligible research articles that have been deposited in PubMed Central, and

2. The lag time between an article's publication in a journal and its availability in PubMed Central.

Rick Johnson, Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), said, "Frankly, this just-announced policy is neither what we hoped for nor proposed and it falls far short of the 'bright light' of transparency that Dr. Zerhouni promised earlier this week in his ethics reforms."

Johnson continued, "However, we are eager for it to succeed. The proof is in the pudding. The coming months will tell
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