The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public for free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.
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Description
The NIH Public Access Policy applies Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008) which states:
"The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require 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 of 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."
Applicability
The work must be:
1. Peer reviewed
2. Published or approved for publication by a journal on or after April 7, 2008
3. "And, arises from:
Compliance
Authors hold copyright in their work, and are responsible for making sure that in any agreement with a publisher they keep the right to give PubMed Central a non-exclusive license to make a copy of the paper available. Journals with agreements with NIH submit final published versions of papers. For other publishers, authors are required to submit papers when they are accepted for publication. The NIH grant holder is responsible for ensuring this. The author, publisher, or institution continues to hold the copyright as usual. The author may choose to include the article in the Open Access Subset by using one of the Creative Commons licenses.
Publishers who want to make a profit or support a scholarly society may require that "public access" be delayed up to 12 months after publication. Only the author's final draft needs to be published, not any contributions made by the publisher. PubMed Central is the designated repository for papers submitted in accordance with the NIH Public Access Policy and for those that fall under similar policies from other funding agencies.
By April 2014, the NIH had increased enforcement of compliance with its Public Access Policy by delaying continuing grant payments for noncompliance.
Response
Peter Suber described the policy as "the first open access mandate for a major public funding agency in the United States; it is also the first one for a public funding agency anywhere in the world that was demanded by the national legislature rather than initiated and adopted independently by the agency."
In 2013 a survey of persons receiving NIH funding and therefore subject to the NIH Public Access policy reported that among 94 respondents, 30% had little understanding of the NIH Public Access Policy and all but two of them said that they accepted the default terms of their copyright forms "as is".
Publishers objected that they could no longer require authors give them all rights to papers from NIH funded research. The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act was a bill sponsored by John Conyers seeking to reverse the NIH policy. It was introduced in 2008 and re-introduced in 2009 but failed to leave committee either year. In 2011 the Research Works Act was introduced to end the policy. It died after protests from the academic community and science publisher Elsevier's withdrawal of support.