How to Comply with the NIH Public Access Policy

The NIH Public Access Policy requires scientists to submit the final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, ensuring the public has access to the results of NIH-funded research.

• Manuscripts accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025 must be made available in PubMed Central (PMC) as soon as they are published (NOT-OD-25-101).
• Manuscripts accepted on or after after April 7, 2008 must be deposited into PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.

✔ Is your paper peer-reviewed?

✔ Did it result from any of the following?

• Direct funding from an NIH grant, contract or cooperative agreement
• Direct funding from the NIH Intramural Program
• An NIH employee

Principal Investigators are responsible for the following for any peer-reviewed paper that arises directly from their awards, even if they are not an author or co-author of the manuscript:

• All peer reviewed papers arising from NIH funds must be deposited into PubMed Central within the correct time frame.
• All NIH applications, proposals and progress reports must include the PubMed Central ID (PMCID) when citing an article that arose from NIH grant(s).
• NIH requires the use of MyNCBI for managing publications in eSNAP Progress Reports.
  • When logging into MyNCBI, you must use the NIH login option and your eRA Commons Credentials.
• You must create a MyNCBI account that is linked to your eRA Commons account and add ALL NIH funded publications to My Bibliography.

For non-competing continuation grant awards with a start date of July 1, 2013 or beyond, NIH will delay processing of an award if publications arising from it are not in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

NIH will not process Research Performance Progress Reports (RPPRs) until all papers arising from the award are compliant with the public access policy. Funding for awards with non-compliant RPPRs could be delayed.