National Library of Medicine's Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System

Pursuant to the request of a congressional committee which is considering legislative action regarding the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) recovery of costs through user charges, GAO provided information on the provision of information products and services by NLM through its Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) and the related Index Medicus publications.

Office of Management and Budget Circular A-25 requires that Federal agencies recover the full costs of services provided except when the recipient is engaging in a nonprofit activity for public safety, health, or welfare or when the payment of full costs would not be in the best interest of the program. The current NLM user-charge policy requires that all users, regardless of type, pay the full costs of accessing the MEDLARS databases. Costs associated with generating and maintaining the MEDLARS databases are absorbed by NML as part of its responsibility as a library. The vast majority of users of the MEDLARS databases have been excluded by NLM from the full cost-recovery requirement because the public benefits from their use of MEDLARS. However, a number of the database users are nonhealth professionals whose use of MEDLARS may not be directly related to the public good. These users should be charged fees sufficient to recover full costs. Based on the user charges in effect in fiscal year 1981, NLM recovered about 72 percent of the MEDLARS-related accessing costs and 44 percent of the total MEDLARS-related costs. NLM would have recovered about 95 percent of its accessing costs and 58 percent of the total MEDLARS-related costs in 1981 had its current policy and user charges been in effect. Overall, the methods used by NLM to identify and allocate costs to MEDLARS-related activities were reasonable. However, the computer time and printed page costs were understated which resulted in an understatement of the charges imposed on users of the system.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Robert A. Peterson Team: General Accounting Office: Human Resources Division Phone: (202) 275-6207