Managing NIH Public Access Compliance

The NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system allows you to submit an electronic version of your peer-reviewed final manuscript for inclusion in PubMed Central. Once submitted, your article will receive an NIHMSID # for tracking purposes.

NIH Public Access Policy:
Requirement to submit the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of NIH-funded research to PubMed Central (PMC).

Open Access (OA):
Literature that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

PubMed Central (PMC)
NLM's digital, open access archive of full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles.
Unique identifier: PMCID

PubMed:
Database of biomedical journal citations, abstracts and links to selected full text articles, including those in PubMed Central.
Unique identifier: PMID

Author Accepted Manuscript
Author’s final manuscript accepted for journal publication after peer-review:

• Includes all modifications from the peer review process
• Electronic files of text, figures, tables, etc.
• May be submitted by Authors & Publishers

Final Published Article
Journal’s formatted, authoritative copy of the paper as published:

• Includes all modifications from peer review and the publishing process: copyediting, stylistic edits, and formatting changes
• May be submitted by Publishers/Journals only

Reviewer
Is responsible for approving, signing off on the Submission Statement.

• ensuring the PMC-ready documents are complete
• approving documents for release in PMC 

Embargo
Any delay imposed after publication before the article is available on PubMed Central. 

Principal Investigator (PI)
The person funding the work. Can also be an author or reviewer of the manuscript. 

• Responsible for following funding guidelines