The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016 increases the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) funding approximately 3.36 percent above Fiscal Year (FY) 2015. The legislation provides NLM with $394,664,000 for FY 2016 (October 1, 2015 - September 30, 2016).
For the first time, Congress has appropriated $44.5 million in direct funds to support implementation of the public access policy, genome-wide association studies, and other NLM initiatives. Previously, this funding was transferred to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) from other NIH Institutes.
The Senate Appropriations Committee cites its reasoning for providing direct funding to NCBI in Senate Report 114-74:
"National Center for Biotechnology Information [NCBI].--The Committee recommendation includes funding directly to NLM for NCBI to meet the challenge of collecting, organizing, analyzing, and disseminating the increasing amounts of data related to research in molecular biology and genomics, and to support the deposit of manuscripts in PubMed Central under the NIH Public Access Policy. Providing the increase specifically to NLM, as opposed to previous years where NLM received funding from individual Institutes and Centers for these activities, increases funding transparency and enhances NCBI's ability to provide an integrated, genomic resource for biomedical researches at NIH and around the globe."
MLA and AAHSL supported the importance of providing this direct funding during our June 2015 Capitol Hill meetings with House and Senate Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS) Appropriations committee members and Congressional staff.