Starting in April 2013, NIH will hold processing of non-competing continuation awards if publications arising from the grant awards are not in compliance with the Public Access Policy. (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/index.htm). The Public Access Policy applies to any manuscript that is peer-reviewed, accepted for publication in a journal on or after April 7, 2008, and arises from any direct funding from NIH in the Fiscal Year 2008 or beyond.
There are four methods to ensure that an applicable paper is submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy (see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process.htm). Authors may use whichever method is most appropriate for them and consistent with their publishing agreement. Note: The PubMed Central reference number (PMCID) is different from the PubMed reference number (PMID). PubMed Central is an index of full-text papers, while PubMed is an index of abstracts.
Investigators will need to establish a ‘My NCBI’ (National Center for Biotechnology Information) account to gain access to their online portal—“My Bibliography”—where users maintain and manage the list of all of their authored works, such as journal articles, manuscripts accepted for publication, books, and book chapters and link these publications to their grants [data to populate My NCBI comes from PubMed Central and the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) systems]. Linking a Commons account to a new or existing My NCBI account then allows references saved in My Bibliography to automatically appear in users’ Commons accounts for submission in progress reports. It is suggested that investigators use the ‘sign in with NIH Login’ option to set up their My NCBI account.
Manuscripts are to be submitted through the NIH Manuscript Submission System. NIH awardees are responsible for ensuring that all steps of the NIHMS submission process are complete within three months of publication.
NIH training materials related to the Public Access Policy, including how to use the My NCBI and My Bibliography systems, are located at: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/communications.htm. Please contact Sherie Donahue (x83911, sdonahue@llu.edu) or Cindy Dickson (x 44571, cdickson@llu.edu) if you have any questions about this policy or if you need clarification on whether or not one of your publications is compliant.