National Institutes of Health (NIH)

What is covered by the policy

"The NIH public access policy applies to any manuscript¹ that:

• Is peer-reviewed;
• And, is accepted for publication in a journal on or after April 7, 2008;
• And, arises from:
  • Any direct funding from an NIH grant or cooperative agreement active in Fiscal Year 2008 or beyond, or;
  • Any direct funding from an NIH contract signed on or after April 7, 2008, or;
  • Any direct funding from the NIH Intramural Program, or;
  • An NIH employee."

¹ Until further notice, manuscripts written in scripts other than Latin (e.g., Russian, Japanese) cannot be processed by the NIHMS. These manuscripts are not required to be posted on PubMed Central and do not require evidence of compliance on applications, proposals or reports. The NIHMS continues to process manuscripts written in Latin (Roman) script that contain characters and fonts used in standard mathematical notation.

Does the Public Access Policy apply to dissertations or book chapters?
"No, the policy only applies to peer-reviewed journal manuscripts. See http://publicaccess.nih.gov/determine-applicability.htm for the full criteria. Please also be sure to confirm that the publication does not meet the public access definition for a journal ."

Further criteria

Address copyright

"Before you sign a publication agreement or similar copyright transfer agreement, make sure that the agreement allows the paper to be posted to PubMed Central (PMC) in accordance with the NIH Public Access Policy."

Include PMCID in Citations

"Anyone submitting an application, proposal or report to the NIH must include the PMC reference number (PMCID) when citing applicable papers that they author or that arise from their NIH-funded research."

Deposit into PMC

"Papers are required to be submitted via the NIHMS upon acceptance for publication. Publishers, authors or their designee deposit files and the NIHMS converts them to the PMC native format."

Paying for NIH publications

Will NIH pay for publication costs?
"Yes. Publication costs, including author fees, may be charged to NIH grants and contracts on three conditions:

1. Such costs incurred are actual, allowable, and reasonable to advance the objectives of the award
2. Costs are charged consistently regardless of the source of support
3. All other applicable rules on allowability of costs are met."

(All quotations taken from NIH policy pages and FAQ on 08/06/2023)

What is covered by the policy

"Any author accepted manuscript accepted for publication in a journal, on or after December 31, 2025, that is the result of funding by NIH in whole or in part through:

• A grant or cooperative agreement, including training grants,
• A contract,
• An Other Transaction,
• NIH intramural research, or
• The official work of an NIH employee."

Further criteria

Address copyright and include statements

"NIH encourages authors to include a statement that indicates the author accepted manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy and that this means that NIH, as the funding agency, has the right to make the author accepted manuscript publicly available in PubMed Central upon the official date of publication."

Licence requirement

"mirrors that of the Government Use License [...] explicitly granting NIH the right to make the Author Accepted Manuscript publicly available through PubMed Central without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication"

Deposit into PMC

"Compliance with the Policy may be achieved through either:

• Submission of the electronic version of the author accepted manuscript to PubMed Central upon its acceptance for publication, for public availability without embargo upon the official date of publication, or
• Submission of the final published article to PubMed Central from journals or publishers with formal agreements with NLM, upon the Official Date of Publication, for public availability without embargo."

Paying for NIH publications

"The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reiterates that compliance with the Public Access Policy is free"

See: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-048.html for more information on how to pay for costs

Excluded costs:

"Journal or publisher fees that arise during the course of the publication process for the sole purpose of submitting the Author Accepted Manuscript to PubMed Central are not allowable costs. Compliance with the Policy does not require the payment of an open access fee to a journal."

The NIH also lists other unallowable costs on their website (linked above)

(All quotations taken from NIH policy pages and FAQ on 20/01/2025)

What is covered by the policy

"Specifically, this Policy applies to:

• Competing grant and cooperative agreement applications that are submitted to NCI in response to a Cancer Moonshot Research Project funding opportunity announcement on or after October 1, 2017.
• Proposals for contracts for Cancer Moonshot Research Projects that are submitted on or after October 1, 2017.
• NCI intramural Cancer Moonshot Research Projects generating Publications and Underlying Primary Data on or after October 1, 2017."

Deposit into PMC

"Electronic copies of Publications will be deposited in PubMed Central with proper tagging of metadata to ensure online discoverability and accessibility within four weeks of acceptance by a journal. If the publisher will not be able to deposit the article into Pubmed Central by this timeframe, the author should consider submitting the manuscript through the NIH Manuscript Publishing System."

No embargo period accepted

"Publications will be made publicly available immediately without any embargo period."

(All quotations taken from NCI Cancer Moonshot policy pages on 08/06/2023)