The NIH Public Access Policy and My NCBI

NIH Public Access Policy

The NIH Public Access Policy affects you if you have a current NIH grant or have students or staff whose salaries are paid by NIH.

The NIH Public Access Policy requires all NIH-funded investigators to submit their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to the NIH’s PubMed Central (PMC) database upon acceptance for journal publication. The requirement applies to any NIH direct funding, including grants, contracts, training grants, subcontracts, etc. PMC will then make these papers freely available to the public no later than 12 months after publication.

This policy will affect NIH grant recipients in two ways:

1. Articles resulting from your grant must be submitted to PubMed Central either by the journal or by you.
2. The PubMed Central ID number or Submission Number must be referenced in your NIH applications, proposals and progress reports submitted on or after May 25, 2008

For more information on compliance with this policy, see the UC Berkeley Library Scholarly Communication page on the NIH Mandate: How To Comply.

Important links:

NIH Public Access Policy overview

NIH Public Access Policy FAQ

PMC submission methods

Journals that submit articles to PMC

Letter to publishers to retain your right to submit to PMC

SHERPA RoMEO: Publisher copyright policies

Managing Compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy using My NCBI

Program directors and principal investigators must now use My NCBI's "My Bibliography" tool to manage their professional bibliographies. For more information see the NIH notice of this policy.

See My NCBI Help for step-by-step instructions on managing compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

Required actions:

1. Establish a My NCBI account to gain access to My Bibliography. Users can log in to My NCBI and access My Bibliography from eRA Commons, or they can log in directly to My NCBI using their Commons username and password.

2. Link My NCBI and eRA Commons accounts. Linking a Commons account to a My NCBI account allows references saved in My Bibliography to automatically appear in the linked Commons account.

3. Enter citations into My NCBI: Commons no longer supports manual entry of citations. Citations must be added to My Bibliography in order to appear in Commons.

Grantees now have the ability to track compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy using My Bibliography:

• Compliance status is indicated by a color code assigned to each citation.
• A direct link to the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS) allows PD/PIs to initiate, or authors to continue, the manuscript submission process.
• Citations will be automatically updated with PMCIDs when they become available.

Users can propose, confirm, or reject grant-paper associations in Commons; associate their My Bibliography citations with an eSNAP (electronic Streamlined Non-competing Award Process) progress report in Commons; and designate delegates to maintain their professional bibliographies in My Bibliography.

My NCBI can also be used to set your PubMed preferences, save searches, create and share collections, and receive automatic e-mail search updates, among other features. For additional help, see:

• The My NCBI Help page
• Keeping up-to-date by creating alerts
• My NCBI and you!, a guide produced by Arnold Library of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA