The NIH has a number of resources further explaining their policy and processes:
To comply with the Public Access Policy:
Notes:
There are multiple methods of submission to PubMed Central, depending primarily on your choice of journal.
Before choosing a journal in which to publish your NIH funded work, make sure the journal policies allow you to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy.
Authors are responsible for compliance with the policy. You must make sure that all publication agreements that you sign will allow you to submit your manuscript to PubMed Central. When submitting the manuscript to a journal, make the editor aware that the work was NIH funded and needs to comply with their public access policy.
The NIH provides an example of the kind of language that can be used to transparently communicate this with the editor: NIH Guidance for Communicating Rights in Submitted Manuscript
The NIH states that it has not yet encountered a publisher that refuses to comply with NIH policy. However, this does not mean that you won't encounter one going forward. The 2024 policy no longer allows for an embargo period, but many journals still impose one. Contact the NIH at PublicAccess@nih.gov for more information and assistance.
See the Journal Policies section of this guide for more information on the relevant policies of some major publishers.
The use of MyBibliography allows the user to link articles both in and outside of PubMed to grants, to easily view compliance status on all articles, and to rapidly generate lists of articles by grant award in pdf format. All grant-linked articles in My Bibliography are automatically imported into eRA Commons. Also, once a grant has been linked to a citation in MyBibliography for one author, the grant association to the citation will automatically appear linked in the MyBibliography of all authors. This is extremely helpful for articles which did not originally cite the grant award.
To use MyBibliography:
Note that it NOT necessary for an article to be in PubMed and have a PMID for compliance. An article that is not in PubMed can be added to MyBibliography and linked to a grant award. The requirement for compliance is that the article is in PubMedCentral and has a PMCID. See the "PMCIDs" section of this LibGuide for more information on the difference between a PMID and a PMCID.
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