National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy

The National Institutes of Health have recently issued a new policy regarding open access for all NIH-funded research. The new policy, designed to give public access to all peer-reviewed literature stemming from NIH-funded projects, requires that all such articles accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008 be placed in NIH's open access repository, PubMedCentral.

Who is Affected

This policy applies to you if your project falls under one of the following criteria:

• Directly^* funded by an NIH grant or cooperative agreement active in Fiscal Year 2008 (October 1, 2007- September 30, 2008) or beyond;
• Directly* funded by a contract signed on or after April 7, 2008;
• Directly funded by the NIH Intramural Program.
• If NIH pays your salary.
  

* Costs that can be specifically identified with a particular project or activity.

The principal investigator for each project is responsible for their project's compliance with the mandate. Even if they are not listed as authors of a resulting paper, they must make sure that all resulting peer-reviewed publications are submitted.

How to Comply

Retain Rights

Ensure that you retain the rights needed to submit your article to PubMedCentral. The SHERPA/RoMEO website indicates whether certain journals' policies allow for NIH mandate compliance. If not, you can use the Author Addendum to amend the publication agreement to allow for the submission of your work to the repository.

Submit your Work

It is the author's responsibility to ensure that affected publications are submitted to PubMedCentral. There are a number of ways to make sure that your work gets submitted to PubMed Central.

• Publish your articles with journals that participate in PubMedCentral. These journals automatically transfer all published articles to PubMedCentral. No further action is required of the author beyond publication. A list of these journals can be found at:  http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm
• Publish with a journal that will submit the article to PubMedCentral for you. Some journal publishers, including Elsevier, Blackwell, and Springer have such policies and will submit articles on request. The principal investigator will need to review the submission and will recieve an email prompting this action.
• Submit the article yourself. To submit an article using the NIH Manuscript Submission System, go to http://www.nihms.nih.gov and fill in the form with all relevant information, including author names, applicable grant numbers, journal, and article title. Upload an electronic version of the final, refereed article with any supplemental materials. The principal investigator will need to review the submission, and will receive an email to prompt this action. The NIH provides submission tutorials on their website.
  

Cite Articles Correctly

Beginning May 25, 2008, in any correspondence to NIH, including applications, proposals, and reports, all citations to any NIH-funded articles must include the PubMedCentral reference number.

Examples:

Varmus H, Klausner R, Zerhouni E, Acharya T, Daar A, Singer P. 2003. PUBLIC HEALTH: Grand Challenges in Global Health. Science 302(5644): 398–399. PMCID: 243493

Zerhouni, EA. (2003) A New Vision for the National Institutes of Health. Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology (3), 159–160. PMCID: 400215

Further Resources

For more information regarding the NIH Open Access Mandate, please visit the following links:

• NIH Public Access - This is the NIH's own website to provide information and instruction regarding the mandate.
• NIH Public Policy Guide for Research Universities - The Association of Research Libraries has put together this resource for university libraries and researchers.
• Complying with the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright considerations and options - This white paper was produced jointly by SPARC and Science Commons and addresses in detail the steps that authors must take in order to secure sufficient rights to comply with the policy. 
• PubMedCentral - PubMedCentral is the NIH's open access repository.
• NIH Manuscript Submission System - This is the starting point for PubMedCentral submissions, and the site contains several tutorials and FAQs useful to submitters.