Scholarly Communications Corner: New NIH Public Access Compliance

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.

Scholarly Communications Corner is a new column in the Dana Medical Library Newsletter featuring relevant information on a variety of scholarly communications topics from open access to digital repositories.

NIH Open Access Policy Update

The NIH Public Access Policy will continue to be in effect in 2009 and “thereafter,” according to a provision in the recently approved federal appropriations bill.

“The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter [emphasis added] that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.”

The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles are then made publicly available online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. Nature reports in its online News section that the “Open-access policy flourishes at NIH,” (April 7, 2009.) [http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/458690a]

The Dana Medical Library presentation NIH Public Access: Submissions, copyright, and compliance is available for UVM and FAHC audiences. If you would like to schedule this presentation for your own department, lab, or other group please contact Donna.Omalley@uvm.edu. Information from the presentation is also available on the Dana Medical Library web site: NIH Public Access Policy [http://danaguides.uvm.edu/NIHPublicAccess].

Library Offers Assistance with Revised NIH Public Access Policy

Confused about the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy Revision that went into effect on April 7, 2008? The Dana Medical Library presentation on NIH Public Access: Submissions, copyright, and compliance has been provided to two groups at UVM/FAHC and is scheduled for presentation to a third group. If you would like to schedule this presentation for your own department, lab, or other group please contact Jeanene Light. Powerpoint slides from the presentation are available.