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NIH Public Access Policy Help Guide

Explains the NIH Public Access Policy, the process for submitting peer reviewed articles to PubMed Central and using myNCBI to verify compliance.

Determining Applicability

There are three primary criteria for determining whether your manuscript falls under the Public Access Policy.

Result of funding by NIH in whole or in part
The scope is intentionally broad, and includes grants, cooperative agreements, subawards, contracts, intramural research, etc. Manuscripts still fall under the policy regardless of whether Principal Investigator is listed as author.
Note: Manuscripts that make use of NIH resources (e.g., datasets) but are not funded by NIH do NOT fall under the policy.
Peer-reviewed
The Policy applies specifically to journal peer-reviewed journal articles. It does not apply book chapters, dissertations, preprints, or other interim research products that are not peer-reviewed or accepted for publication in a journal.

NIH considers a journal to be a periodical publication that is either 1) included in the “journal” section of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Catalog or 2) meets all of the following criteria:

  • Requirements for ISSN assignment;
  • Content is issued over time under a common title;
  • Is a collection of articles by different authors; and
  • Is intended to be published indefinitely.
Accepted for publication
While it is good practice to prepare and familiarize yourself with the Policy ahead of time, it only applies to accepted manuscripts.

Prepare Manuscript

Set aside some time to manage your compliance with NIH's Public Access Policy.

  1. Familiarize yourself with the publisher you are targeting to see how much help they are willing to give with complying with the NIH Public Access Policy.
  2. Designate someone (PI, author, staff member) to ensure that the manuscript moves along in the process to deposit in PubMed Central.  Ultimately, the PI is responsible.
  3. If you are an author but not the PI, notify PI that you are working on a manuscript so s/he can plan to follow its progress.
  4. Create a My NCBI account and link it to your eRA Commons account.

Establish Agreement with Publisher

  1. Communicate your need to comply with NIH's Public Access Policy.
  2. Understand who will be responsible for submitting the manuscript to the NIH Manuscript Submission system (NIHMS).  Methods A, B, and D (publisher submits manuscript). Method C (author or designate submits).

Submit and Monitor Manuscript

  1. Regardless of which submission method is used, take the time to ensure that the submission has occurred.
  2. NIHMS Submission Steps
  3. Approve NIHMS submissions when requested.  Initial submission approval and approval to display in PubMed Central once formatting is complete.
  4. Use My Bibliography to link publications to Awards and to monitor compliance.
  5. There is a designated Compliance Monitor in the Office of Sponsored Research who can monitor at the institution level.

Use PMCID Number

  1. Use the NIHMSID number or the notation "PMC Journal - In Process" for up to 3 months after the article is published.
  2. Use PMCID number when it's available.  PMCID/NIHMSID numbers, along with PMID, will appear in My Bibliography.  You can also find corresponding PMCID/NIHMSID based on PMID using the PMCID Converter.
  3. Use MyNCBI/My Bibliography to manage your compliance to the NIH Public Access Policy.  You may share your My Bibliography collection with a delegate to assist with managing the bibliography. [video]
  4. Use My Bibliography to generate a PDF of publications to submit with Research Performance Progress Reports.