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PRINCIPLES REGARDING RESEARCH

The American Medical Student Association:

1.             SUPPORTS the increased efforts of the National Institutes of Health and the medical research community to address the health issues of women. (1994)

2.             ENCOURAGES the National Institutes of Health and the medical research community to increase efforts to address the health issues of minorities. (1994)

3.             ENCOURAGES the National Institutes of Health and the medical research community to increase efforts to address the health issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons. (1994)

4.             SUPPORTS efforts in the medical research community to increase the amount of prospective, population-based outcomes research. (1994)

5.             OPPOSES the systematic exclusion of women from participation as subjects in medical research on the basis of their reproductive potential; (1997)

6.             ENCOURAGES the inclusion of women as research subjects in all medical research that could potentially benefit women; (1997)

7.             BELIEVES that research about the transmission, progression and presentation of HIV infection and HIV disease in women should include, but not be limited to, possible transmission to her offspring. (1997)

8.             ENCOURAGES education of the consequence of diethylstilbestrol exposure (DES) so that medical students and health-care professionals receive satisfactory knowledge of the signs and symptons of DES exposure in both the mother and her children.  Furthermore, AMSA SUPPORTS continued federally funded research on DES exposure and the future health of those affected. (1998)

9.             With Regards to Clinical Trial Databases and Open Access Publishing: (2005)

a.             SUPPORTS the creation of a centralized and comprehensive national registry of all publicly and privately funded clinical trials involving drugs, biological products, or devices regardless of the outcome of the trial. (2005)

b.             Supports taxpayer-funded research being freely available in PubMed Central or a similar repository immediately upon publication. (2005)

c.             SUPPORTS the concept of open access publishing, defined by the Bethesda criteria as follows: (2005)

                An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions:

1.             The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use. (2005)

2.             A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository). (2005)

                [1] Where:

1.             Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers. (2005)

2.             Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.  (2005)

d.             SUPPORTS the Public Library of Science as a model of open access publishing. (2005)