PubMed Central Side
When submitting a manuscript to NIH, you must agree to a standard license that mirrors that of the Government Use License at 2 CFR 200.315 or any successor legislation. This explicitly grants NIH the right to make the manuscript publicly available via PubMed Central without any embargo.
Features of the Government Use License:
- Non-exclusive - authors retain rights to their research output.
Beware that some default journal licenses have authors sign over exclusive rights to the publisher which does limit the author's rights to re-use, access, and build upon their own work.
- Prior license - it cannot be over-ridden by any subsequent agreements in the research process. This includes giving publishers exclusive rights to the author's research.
- Federal copyright law provides that written nonexclusive licenses remain in place even after exclusive rights have been signed away.
The power of the Federal purpose license lies in the fact that it takes effect immediately upon signing the grant agreement. The agency retains its license even if an author later signs exclusive rights to a publisher, and even if the publisher does not give permission to do so.