The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) is an informal coalition of libraries, patient and health policy advocates, and other stakeholders who support reforms that will make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public. The Alliance was created in August 2004 to support proposals from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and US Congress to change the policies for the dissemination of publicly funded research findings. The Alliance supports the proposals that call for NIH grantees to deposit final manuscripts of their research articles in PubMed Central, NIH's open online archive, at the time they are accepted for publication by a journal.

The initial Alliance members include over 40 institutions and organizations concerned about the accessibility of research articles. These include a large number of patient advocacy groups campaigning on behalf of people suffering from particular diseases, as well as library associations and representatives from the academic libraries of several large American universities.

The Alliance was created to lobby policy-makers to ensure that the public have free online access to the estimated 60,000 peer-reviewed articles describing scientific research funded by the NIH that are accepted for publication each year. The ATA has stated three basic principles that unite its members: (1) American taxpayers are entitled to open access to the peer-reviewed scientific articles about research funded by the NIH; (2) Open access to these reports will lead to usage by millions of physicians, public health professionals, patients, students, teachers, scientists and others, and will deliver an accelerated return on the taxpayers' investment in NIH; and (3) widespread dissemination of these reports is an essential, inseparable component of the national investment in science.