What is the NIH Public Access Policy?
• The National Institutes of Health public access policy requires NIH authors to deposit their peer-reviewed articles in PubMed Central (the NIH’s digital repository for biomedical research) at the time of submission to a publisher. This policy became a requirement as of December 26, 2007. See: Details relevant to MIT authors. • Other funding organizations around the world have mandated open access for research. One of the most prominent examples in 2006 was the UK’s Wellcome Trust, an independent charity that funds research to improve human and animal health. The Wellcome trust makes deposit mandatory for authors when submitting for publication, though a delay of up to six months prior to release to the public is acceptable. (Such a delay is called an embargo by the open access movement.) • Other research funding organizations also have open access policies.
• What is PubMed Central? PubMed Central is an archive of full-text biomedical journal papers available online without a fee. Papers on PubMed Central contain links to other scientific databases such as GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/) and PubChem (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). Papers collected under the Public Access Policy are archived on PubMed Central. More information about PubMed Central is available at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/faq.html.
