NIH Public Access Policy in a Nutshell
Friday, April 26th, 2013
By Jeanene Light, MLS
As most National Institute of Health (NIH) Principal Investigators (PI’s) and authors have heard, beginning in Spring 2013, NIH may delay funds from grant-holders not in compliance with the public access policies. The public policy requires all peer-reviewed articles published with direct NIH support to report PMCID numbers within 12 months of publication.
MyNCBI has been adapted to serve PI’s as a tool for determining compliance and for reporting PubMed Central (PMC) articles. Author-researchers can “associate” their publications with their NIH grants, track their compliance in PMC, and create bibliographies for reporting to the NIH. It is as simple as signing into MyNCBI with an eRA Commons username and password.
The University of Vermont’s Sponsored Projects Administration (SPA) , and Jeanene Light, MLS, Dana Medical Library, have teamed up to provide tools to assist PI’s and authors reach compliance. The Dana Medical Library’s research guide at: http://danaguides.uvm.edu/NIH-Public-Policy provides assistance in identifying journals that submit automatically to PMC, specifies procedures for submitting articles “manually”, and offers copyright transfer agreement advice. The research guide also includes links to NIH FAQ’s and videos, as well as contact information for Ms. Light and SPA administrators.
Additionally, the Sponsored Project Administration office now has access to the Public Access Compliance Monitor which provides the current compliance status of all journal articles that NIH believes a particular grantee institution is responsible for under the terms of the Public Access Policy. In addition to classifying articles according to compliance status, the compliance monitor provides detailed information about each article: a full citation; associated grants and program directors/principal investigators (PDs/PIs); the PubMed ID and related IDs where available; and a link to the PubMed record. Institutions can also track the status of papers deposited into the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system.
For a quick, eight minute video highlighting the changes and the procedures, watch the video produced by NYU’s Health Sciences Libraries: bit.ly/11Q39kY. If you have further questions, please contact Jeanene Light or your SPA administrator.
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