NIH Public Access Policy

NIH Public Access Policy

Key Features

In late 2007 President George W. Bush signed into law a bill requiring NIH to mandate public access to the results of NIH funded research. All investigators funded by NIH are required to submit or have submitted for them an electronic copy of their final peer-reviewed manuscript to PubMed Central. The manuscript will be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. PubMed Central (PMC) is a digital repository maintained by the National Library of Medicine.

Important Dates

April 2008: As of April 7, 2008, all articles arising from NIH funds must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication.
May 25, 2008: As of May 25, 2008, NIH applications, proposals, and progress reports must include the PubMed Central reference number when citing an article that falls under the policy and is authored or co-authored by the investigator, or arose from the investigator's NIH award. This policy includes applications submitted to the NIH for the May 25, 2008 due date and subsequent due dates.

NIH grantees can submit manuscripts to PubMed Central by logging in to the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) web site. Visit NIH’s Public Access web site for the complete policy and FAQ's.

• Many journals submit articles to PMC on behalf of authors. If you publish your article in one of these journals, you need do nothing further to comply with the submission requirement. Click here for a complete list.

• For any other journal you must inform the journal that the article is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy when submitting it for publication. Make sure that the copyright transfer or other publication agreement allows the article to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Policy. As an example, the kind of language that an author or institution might add to a copyright agreement includes the following:

"Journal acknowledges that Author retains the right to provide a copy of the final manuscript to the NIH upon acceptance for Journal publication, for public archiving in PubMed Central as soon as possible but no later than 12 months after publication by Journal."

For more information, see the NIH Public Access FAQs covering copyright transfer.

• You can learn more about submitting manuscripts to PMC by viewing the illustrated submission tutorials available on the NIHMS web site.

Benefits of Policy

Potential benefits of the public access policy for NIH grantees include:

• Grant progress reporting requirements will be fulfilled by substituting manuscript deposit for the submission of print copies of articles.

• Articles will be preserved and archived by the National Library of Medicine.

• Articles deposited to PMC will be cross-indexed with other NCBI databases such as PubMed and GenBank.

• Visibility (and possibly, citation) of the research will be enhanced by public access.