What is the NIH Public Access Policy?
Is PubMed Central the same as PubMed?
What types of awards fall under the Policy?
What is the penalty for not complying with the Policy?
Who is responsible for complying with the Policy?
What version of the manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central?
Can PIs delegate their compliance responsibilities to someone else?
How do you find the PMCID of an article?
Do I need to tell the journal that my article is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy when I submit my manuscript?

What is the NIH Public Access Policy?
The NIH Public Access Policy requires that all investigators funded by the NIH, upon acceptance of a publication, submit, or have submitted for them, an electronic version of the final peer-reviewed manuscript to the digital archive, PubMed Central. 

Effective July 1, 2025, that publication must be made public in PubMed Central on the date of publication, which is the first date the final version of the article is made available, whether electronic or print. 

Is PubMed Central the same as PubMed?

No. PubMed Central (PMC) is an archive of full-text biomedical journal papers available online without a fee. PubMed is a free database containing references and abstracts accessing on life sciences and biomedical topics. If an article is indexed in PubMed, this does not indicate that it is currently in, or will necessarily be in, PubMed Central. 

What types of awards fall under the Policy?

Any NIH funding – including continuing grants or cooperative agreements – falls under the terms of this Policy.

What is the penalty for not complying with the Policy?

Non-compliance of this Policy will delay processing of non-competing continuation grant awards for all grants with start dates or renewal dates on or after July 1, 2013. The award will not be processed until recipients have demonstrated compliance.

Who is responsible for complying with the Policy?

Institutions and Principal Investigators (PI) are responsible for compliance. The PI of the grant is responsible even if they are not an author or co-author of a publication that falls under the NIH policy.

What version of the manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central?

For those publications for which the journal does not submit to PubMed Central on behalf of the investigator, the Investigators must submit the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central. The final, peer-reviewed manuscript is the version including all modifications from the peer review process, but before the journal has done their final editing and formatting.

Can PIs delegate their compliance responsibilities to someone else?

Yes. PIs may assign a delegate from their My NCBI accounts to manage the compliance of publications. To assign a delegate, PIs must sign into their My NCBI account, go to their My Bibliography section and click the “settings” link. Under the Bibliography Sharing section, Click the “Add a Delegate” link, enter the delegate’s e-mail address, and click the “Add a Delegate” button. The delegate will receive an email which they must then confirm by clicking on a link in the email. Please note that the option to “Add a Delegate” only appears when a Bibliography has been created in My NCBI.

How do you find the PMCID of an article?

The PMCID is posted in PubMed as soon as an article has been successfully processed by PubMed Central (PMC), which usually occurs around the time of publication. PMCIDs are listed in the lower right corner of the Abstract Plus view of PubMed.

Do I need to tell the journal that my article is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy when I submit my manuscript?

The guidance NIH gives is to be transparent during the journal submission process and communicate to the journal or publisher that the Author Accepted Manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy, which means that NIH has the right to make the Author Accepted Manuscript publicly available in PubMed Central upon the Official Date of Publication. They suggest using the following language in the manuscript:

“This manuscript is the result of funding in whole or in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy. Through acceptance of this federal funding, NIH has been given a right to make this manuscript publicly available in PubMed Central upon the Official Date of Publication, as defined by NIH.”