NIH Public Access Policy

***IMPORTANT UPDATE***

On April 30, 2025, the NIH Director announced that the effective date for the new NIH Public Access policy would be moved forward (from December 31, 2025) to July 1, 2025 (please see official announcement here).

Embargo

• Under the new policy, all peer-reviewed publications funded by the NIH that are accepted on or after July 1, 2025 must be made publicly available in PubMed Central without an embargo. 

• Publications accepted before July 1, 2025 are allowed to be embargoed (established by the publisher) for up to a year after the Official Date of Publication.

Official Date of Publication

• For publications accepted before July 1, 2025: the Official Date of Publication is defined as the later of the electronic (Epub) and print publication dates. 

• For publications accepted on or after July 1, 2025: this updated policy also changes the definition of the Official Date of Publication to be when an article is first made available.

Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.

OSTP has been looking into this issue for some time, soliciting broad public input on multiple occasions and convening an interagency working group to develop a policy. The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public.

The NIH Public Access Policy (NIHPAP) implements Division F Section 217 of PL 111-8 (Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009).  

The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

The Policy applies to any manuscript that is:

• Peer-reviewed;
• Accepted for publication in a scholarly journal on or after April 7, 2008;
• Based, at least in part, on:
  • Any direct funding from an NIH grant or cooperative agreement active in Fiscal Year 2008 or beyond
  • Any direct funding from an NIH contract signed on or after April 7, 2008
  • Any direct funding from the NIH Intramural Program
  • An NIH employee.

Note that papers written in scripts other than Latin (e.g., Russian, Japanese) cannot be processed by the NIHMS.  These papers are not required to be posted on PubMed Central. Papers written in Latin (Roman) script that contain characters and fonts used in standard mathematical notation are acceptable.