Newly Expanded NIH Public Access Publishing is Now in Effect
By new policy, NIH-funded PIs must file articles for public access without the 12-month delay previously in place. It is especially important to consult journal licenses and procedures for compliance with this policy, and to consider the new public access regulation when choosing where to publish NIH-funded articles.
The background: In 2022, the Office of Science and Technology Policy announced requirements that science funding agencies make articles available for access by the public without the 12-month embargo (or delay) that federally-funded research articles currently experience. As a result, the NIH has created a policy to require NIH-funded researchers to file their research articles for release to the public by the time of publication, with no embargo period. This update regarding public access to government-funded research goes into effect July 1, six months earlier than previously announced.
The new policy will apply to all articles accepted for publication on or after July 1. In the NIH, public access is managed through PubMed Central (PMC), a service of the National Library of Medicine, which makes the full-text of articles available and links them to PubMed.
There are multiple submission methods for researchers to deposit their articles. Article manuscripts can be manually filed by researchers, or filed by journals on behalf of the authors. The most popular current path is for journal editors to file articles on behalf of authors (officially called “Method A” in documentation). However, few publishers have said they will change to no-embargo filing as part of their services to authors. Some journals or publishers that will file manuscripts on behalf of authors without the embargo are listed on the PMC site, but the list is not updated to reflect all publishers in light of the new policy. The most current information on journal expectations can only be found through each journal’s author portal or terms of submission.
When the publisher won’t deposit a no-embargo article, faculty must deposit an Author Accepted Manuscript into PMC. The Author Accepted Manuscript, or AAM, is the last MS Word (or other word processor) version of the article after all peer review but before the publisher starts final layouts and copyedits. The AAM stage for researchers is a later stage than a preprint, but an earlier stage than what is finally published in journals.
Faculty can manually deposit their AAM using the NIH Manuscript Submission system. The system helps update the researcher’s grant compliance and also processes the Word document and converts it into a file for PMC. That manual deposit process is free, but does take some time and requires mastering the system.
Some journal publishers will file articles without the 12-month embargo if the article is an open access article. To make an article open access in an otherwise subscriber-only access journal typically requires an extra fee. Fees for open access in certain journals are covered by campuswide agreements between the VCU Libraries and some publishers. Open access fees can often be covered in an NIH budget as well. Please use caution though: there are ongoing discussions at the NIH about article fee caps, so future budgetary guidance for article publishing costs may change!
It is still important that you cite and submit articles from research that used Wright Center support, so that future assessment of the Wright Center’s grants have accurate measures of the Center’s impact. If the article does not automatically connect to the Wright Center grant based on your citing the grant during article submission, you can file it in the NIH Manuscript Submission System and link the PMCID you get from that system to award No. UM1TR004360.
More resources on NIH public access compliance are available through the VCU Libraries. For advice on journal licenses or identifying journals that will file articles for you without the embargo, reach out to Scholarly Communications Librarian Katharine Miller or Research Data Librarian Nina Exner for information or to schedule a training or consultation. For help with submitting articles that received support through the Wright Center’s CTSA award, reach out to the Wright Center team.
Many thanks to Katharine Miller, Scholarly Communications Librarian, and Nina Exner, Research Data Librarian, for creating this informative guide on navigating the updated Public Access Policy. We also invite you to join our upcoming Whetting Your Appetite lunch research seminar, “Understanding Changes to the NIH Public Access Policy” led by Dr. Nina Exner. This session will provide an overview of the policy updates, with time for questions and a deeper discussion.
Register: https://vcu.zoom.us/meeting/register/CUtQifBvRaafN7hjc_P0IQ#/registration
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