NIH Public Access Policy Compliance

The NIH Public Access Policy requires that all peer-reviewed work accepted for publication after April 7, 2008 that arises from direct support of the NIH must be made available in PubMed Central no later than 12 months following publication (details of policy). The NIH has begun to pay increasing attention to compliance, as a recent NIH policy notice states "NIH will delay processing of an award if publications arising from it are not in compliance with the NIH public access policy."

Consequently, all peer-reviewed publications arising from the use of CSB facilities, regardless of field of study, must be deposited into PubMed Central to ensure the timely renewal of CSB funding, and thus, user access to our synchrotron facilities.

Currently, there are four different methods for PubMed Central (PMC) submission:

  1. Method A: The journal (current list of journals) will enter the final published manuscript into PMC directly without involving the manuscript authors.
  2. Method B: The journal publisher (current list of publishers) will, if requested by the author(s), enter the final published manuscript into PMC. This often involves choosing an open-access option for the publication agreement.
  3. Methods C & D: Either a manuscript author (Method C) or the publisher (Method D, current list of publishers) submits the final peer-reviewed manuscript using the NIHMS system. Unlike Methods A & B, the author(s) themselves must approve both the NIHMS submission and the final PMC version.

CSB cannot submit or approve manuscripts on behalf of our users in NIHMS, as the manuscript approval steps must be performed by one of the authors on the paper; note that this need not be the corresponding author. We are, however, happy to help our users with the submission process. Please contact us with any questions about NIHMS submission or compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.