Skip Navigation

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

NIH public access policy changing April 7

Next month, the National Institutes of Health will start requiring that journal articles based on NIH-funded research be deposited in the National Library of Medicine’s free public-access digital archive PubMed Central, either as the final journal-published version or as an electronic version of the final peer-reviewed manuscript. PIs who don’t make sure that grant-funded authors follow the mandatory policy could lose funding, NIH warns.

The policy applies to all peer-reviewed articles based in NIH-funded research that are accepted for publication on or after April 7. PIs (or their publishers) must submit their manuscripts to PMC within 12 months of being published. The final manuscript must include graphics and supplemental materials associated with the article. Beginning May 25, 2008, investigators submitting NIH applications, proposals or progress reports also must include the PMC reference number when citing articles covered by the policy.


In regard to the NIH policy, journal publishers fall into three categories:
  1. those who will make the deposit in PubMed Central on behalf of the authors,
  2. those whose existing policies allow authors to make the deposit themselves, and
  3. those who do not allow deposit of articles unless special provision is made at the time copyright is transferred to them. Since this last group includes publishers such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and Springer Verlag, it is important that authors review carefully their copyright agreements for articles accepted by these publishers and negotiate the necessary permissions to comply with the new NIH policy before signing over the publication rights.
A process has been established here at UNL, as a joint initiative between the Library’s Office of Scholarly Communications and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, to help PIs comply with the mandate, by
  1. directing article submissions toward NIH-compliant publishers,
  2. advising authors how to retain the necessary copyrights or permissions to comply with the NIH’s deposit requirement, and
  3. assisting authors with the online deposit of their articles in cases where the journal publisher does not do this for them.
UNL libraries will maintain up to date information about the NIH public access implementation and copyright and author’s rights online at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nihpmcinfo

Full policy details are available at http://publicaccess.nih.gov. Investigators may contact Paul Royster, UNL Libraries, (472-3628; proyster@unl.edu) for more information.