Does NIH fund your work?

Then your manuscript must be made available in PubMed Central.

The NIH Public Access Policy (or "Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research") went into effect on April 7th, 2008. As a result, investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now need to submit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s online archive of biomedical literature. The new reporting requirements apply to articles that arise from direct costs funded by NIH and are accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008.

The new law, which Congress passed as part of the fiscal year 2008 appropriations process, calls for full text of articles to be made freely available to the public no later than 12 months after publication. Beginning May 25, 2008, all applications, proposals and progress reports to the NIH must include PubMed Central or NIH Manuscript Submission reference numbers when citing applicable articles accepted for publication on or after April 7. The new law replaces NIH’s initial voluntary policy—enacted in May 2005—under which researchers were encouraged to make the results of their funded research publicly available.

More Information

To get the full details about the NIH Public Access Policy, please go to http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ or view the Columbia University Libraries Scholarly Communication Program website at http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/nih-public-access-policy/.

To learn more about PubMed Central - a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) - please see http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

Local Assistance

Librarians at CUMC’s Health Sciences Library ((http://library.cpmc.columbia.edu/hsl/ or hs-library@columbia.edu or tel. 212-305-3692) are happy to answer any questions you may have about the policy and its new reporting requirements. We can advise or assist you with:

• Determining if the journal you are publishing with already deposits the final published version of your NIH-funded paper for you – without author involvement (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm )
  
• Submitting your NIH Manuscript to PubMed Central via the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) System (http://www.nihms.nih.gov/)
  
• Negotiating your copyrights with the journal publisher in order to ensure that you can comply with the NIH Public Access Policy (http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/manage-your-copyrights)
  
• Figuring out who to contact if you inadvertently signed an author agreement with a journal that does not permit submission to PubMed Central (http://www.copyright.columbia.edu/)
  
• Tracking down copyright permissions from publishers that may no longer exist under the same name
  
• Finding out the PMCID (PubMed Central reference number) that you are required to include when citing your NIH-funded papers in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/pmctopmid)
  
• Etc.

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