NIH Public Access Policy

NIH requires that all investigators funded by NIH submit to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance of publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. This is required of all investigators (PIs and others), It applies to publications related to all NIH funding (including grants that have ended). The NIH policy http://publicaccess.nih.gov refers to the investigator’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript of a paper accepted for publication, which includes all modifications from the peer review process.

PubMed Central (PMC) http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

is a digital archive of free, full-text journal articles from the biomedical and life sciences that is maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). (Please note this is a different database from PubMed, a citation database, which links to PMC and other content providers.)

Frequently asked questions can be found here: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm

How to submit to PubMed Central (PMC) 

UM is using a system to assist PIs with submission of journal articles to PMC.

Send an email message to:

nihms-library-support@umich.edu

and include the following information:

• PI’s name and grant number(s)
• Name of the journal and, if known, any embargo period required by the publisher
• The manuscript and any supplemental data or images that are associated with it.

For other ways to submit your article, please see:

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process.htm 

As of May 25, 2008, citing the PMCID Number is required for all NIH applications, proposals and progress reports that arise from an NIH award and fall under the Policy.  If an article is in PubMed and also in PMC, it will have both a PubMed ID (PMID) and a PMC ID. Use the converter to translate one type of ID to the other, available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/pmctopmid