It’s the Law

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

— Public Law 110-161, Division G, Title II, Section 218

• Who is affected? The policy applies to grantees and all investigators supported in whole or in part by direct funds from NIH. Compliance is a term and condition of the grant award, cooperative agreement, or contract and also applies to NIH employees and those funded by the agency’s intramural program. (See the NIH website for detailed information on the scope of policy.) While grantees and principle investigators are accountable for compliance, the policy applies to all work funded by a grant—whether or not it is authored by the principal investigator.

• What is affected? The policy applies to all peer-reviewed journal articles, including research reports and reviews. It does not apply to materials that are not peer reviewed such as correspondence, book chapters, and editorials. Washington University School of Medicine has prepared a chart showing which articles fall under the deposit requirement [PDF].

• Publishing agreements: Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements pertaining to submitted articles fully comply with the policy. (See Retaining Rights for more information on copyright management.)

• Submission process: Submitting an article to PubMed Central typically takes less than 10 minutes using the NIH Manuscript Submission system (NIHMS). Questions about the submission procedure can be directed to NIH at: PublicAccess@nih.gov. Submissions can be made on behalf of authors (if they have obtained necessary rights) and many universities plan to offer submission assistance to their investigators (for example, Becker Medical Library of Washington University).

• What to submit: Upon acceptance of an article for publication, the final accepted manuscript version should be deposited in PubMed Central. The final accepted manuscript version (e.g., word processing file) should include all modifications from the publishing and peer-review process and be accompanied by all graphics and supplemental materials associated with the article.

• Access embargo: Investigators may choose to make their article available to the public on PubMed Central immediately or to embargo access for up to 12 months. Some publisher agreements mandate an embargo period.

• Who may deposit? The investigator or someone in his/her organization (e.g., an assistant or library staff member) may deposit a copy of the peer reviewed manuscript using the NIHMS system. If preferred, deposit may be made on the investigator’s behalf by a journal that has arranged to put its articles in PubMed Central. NIH maintains a list of these journals (roughly 300 titles as of January 2008). This is a convenient option for authors, but the tradeoff may be that the publisher delays public access via PubMed Central for up to a year. Some journals have implemented new author fees for depositing articles in PubMed Central or may bundle a deposit fee with other services such as immediate open access. Before paying these fees, authors may wish to investigate whether their institution operates a free service that will aid in deposit with PubMed Central or simply deposit their work themselves.

• Citation in NIH documents: When citing their NIH-funded articles in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, investigators must include the PubMed Central reference number assigned to deposited articles.