When choosing a journal for your manuscript, you MUST confirm that the journal allows you to comply with the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy's provisions for timely deposit in PubMed Central (PMC).
Note that:
For help with questions about choosing a journal that allows NIH PAP compliance, contact Nancy Shin, Scholarly Communications Librarian.
In supplemental guidance, NIH highly encourages authors to explicitly acknowledge NIH funding and NIH Public Access Policy requirements in author accepted manuscripts and final published articles.
NIH suggests the following language for doing this:
This manuscript is the result of funding in whole or in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy. Through acceptance of this federal funding, NIH has been given a right to make this manuscript publicly available in PubMed Central upon the Official Date of Publication, as defined by NIH.
You MUST submit your manuscript, upon its acceptance for publication, to the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS). NIHMS processes your manuscript through a series of steps that culminate in PubMed Central deposit.
"Upon acceptance of publication" can be interpreted as that window of time between when the author accepted manuscript is available and when the final published article is published by the publisher.
To ensure compliance, it is best to deposit the author accepted manuscript as early as possible and well in advance of the official date of publication. It takes time for NIHMS to process your deposit and to issue a PMCID, which is your proof of compliance.
Before you sign a publisher agreement for your manuscript, make sure the agreement allows the manuscript to be posted to PubMed Central in accordance with the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy.
You need to make very clear to your publisher that your manuscript is subject to the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy and that the author accepted manuscript can be deposited into PubMed Central with no embargo period upon publication.
The Government Use License is a nonexclusive license, meaning authors still retain rights to their research products. Authors sometimes sign over exclusive rights to publishers, which limits the author’s rights to reuse, access, and build on their own work.
The Government Use License acts as a “prior license” that the author grants the moment the article is created (in exchange for funding) which cannot be overridden by agreements signed later in the research process. This includes publisher agreements, which may ask for exclusive rights to an author’s research.
Federal copyright law provides that written nonexclusive licenses remain in place even after exclusive rights have been signed away. The power of the Government Use License lies in the fact that it takes effect immediately upon signing the grant agreement. The agency retains its license even if an author later signs exclusive rights to a publisher, and even if the publisher does not give permission to do so.
If you need assistance with navigating copyright questions, see the library's Copyright guide or contact Nancy Shin, Scholarly Communications Librarian.
My Bibliography is a reference tool that helps you create a list of publications by adding them from PubMed, via file upload, or by hand.
When logged in via your eRA Commons account, you can:
The video below provides an introduction to My Bibliography, which you can access when you log in to NCBI via the main NCBI website or via PubMed or other NCBI databases.
See the Monitoring Compliance page of this guide for more information on how setting up My Bibliography will assist in monitoring your publications.