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Managing NIH Public Access Compliance

Copyright Considerations

Publisher Side

  • Be sure the publication agreement retains the right to deposit your article in PubMed Central. You MUST assert that your manuscript is subject to the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy.
  • When submitting a manuscript for peer review, include the NIH Rights Statement. This statement lets publishers and journals know that our work falls under the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy and that NIH has the right to make the work publicly available.
    • Sample Language:
      “I hereby grant to NIH, a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use this work for Federal purposes and to authorize others to do so. This grant of rights includes the right to make the final, peer-reviewed manuscript publicly available in PubMed Central upon the Official Date of Publication.” 
    • 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.”

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.