nih public access policy effective may 2, 2005

Details of NIH’s Public Access Policy

NIH’s new policy on enhancing public access to the results of NIH funded research takes effect on May 2, 2005.  The policy requests NIH grantees to deposit peer-reviewed manuscripts that describe the results of their NIH funded research with PubMed Central (PMC), a digital repository maintained by the National Library of Medicine.  The key features of the policy are:

• It is voluntary.  NIH strongly encourages but does not require grantees to submit their manuscripts.
• It applies to peer-reviewed, NIH funded work only.
• It requests NIH grantees to deposit the author’s final version of the manuscript to PMC, after peer-review but before editing by the journal.
• It requests that manuscripts be made available to the public as soon as possible but no later than 12 months following publication.

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.

NIH grantees can submit manuscripts to PMC by logging in to the NIHMS web site.  You can also read the complete policy and FAQ section on NIH’s Public Access web site.

Guidelines for URMC Researchers

The URMC Committee on Scientific Publishing appointed by David Guzick, M.D., Ph.D., Dean of the School of Medicine & Dentistry supports NIH’s Public Access Policy but recognizes that compliance is voluntary.    UR NIH grantees should be aware of the policy of their target journals before submitting their manuscripts to PMC.  A subset of journals already submit to PMC whereas other publishers are still evolving their response to the NIH policy.  Individual publishers’ policies will be made available on Miner Library’s web site as they become available. 

Please be aware that you need to obtain written permission (email is fine) from your journal publisher to submit your manuscript to PMC if  (1) the journal does not currently deposit articles in PMC, or (2) you wish to make your manuscript publicly available sooner than the journal’s normal release time in PMC.  The most convenient time to do this is when signing the publisher’s copyright transfer agreement after your work has been accepted for publication.  You are free to request that the wording of the copyright transfer agreement be changed to allow compliance with NIH’s Public Access Policy.  The publisher may or may not agree to the changes you request.  In any case, read and honor your copyright agreement.  Draft language for negotiating permission to submit manuscripts to PMC will be available on Miner Library’s web site.