The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy issued an update in 2022 to the original memo in 2013 directing which federal agencies must have policies for grantees on how and when to make their work publicly and freely available. Some of the big changes include:
- Grantees must now make their scholarly articles and data freely available immediately upon publication; the policy used to allow for a 12-month embargo period.
- All federal agencies that award grant funding must now have a policy; previously, it only applied to departments that awarded more than $100 million.
- Peer reviewed book chapters, editorial, and peer reviewed conference proceedings are included now along with peer reviewed journal articles.
Federal departments are required to implement their new policies by the end of 2025.
UNR researchers may contact Teresa Schultz at teresas@unr.edu with questions they have about meeting federal requirements related to grants and open access.
New NIH Public Access Policy
The NIH is the first federal department to implement the new public access policy requirements, starting on July 1, 2025. Here are some important things to keep in mind:
- Applies to any open award where the manuscript is accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025.
- The NIH continues to use PubMed Central as its open repository. All NIH-funded works must be uploaded to PMC upon acceptance. See PMC's instructions for authors on how to find out if they need to deposit the article themselves and how.
- This applies to the accepted version of an article - i.e., it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication but has not been formatted for final publishing. However, final versions that have been published as open access can be used.
- Grantees may budget in costs to publish an article open access into their grant proposals; however, be aware! The NIH has announced plans to cap how much they will pay in article processing charges. This has not been finalized, however, and the NIH has not yet set a maximum amount.
- You do not have to pay to publish your work open access, though! Again, you can publish in a paywalled journal and still meet the policy requirements by uploading the accepted version to PubMed.
- The University Libraries do not provide a fund to help pay for open access publishing fees. We do have agreements with a few publishers (see the home page of this guide) that cover all UNR researchers if they publish with their journals.
- The new policy applies to grant-funded articles accepted after July 1, 2025.
- Failure to comply could affect later grant applications by researchers to the NIH.
Publisher Reactions to NIH Policy
Some publishers have begun to announce their response to the removal of the 12-month embargo allowance from the NIH Public Access Policy. These responses create potential conflict with the NIH policy. For example, some publishers say they will now charge a fee for authors to deposit the author accepted version into an open repository like PubMed Central. Other publishers insist that making the accepted version publicly available immediately violates their policy, which requires an embargo. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Accepting an NIH grant (or any other grant from a federal agency) means researchers give the federal government the non-exclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce and publish their work resulting from the grant. This license would exist in the vast majority of cases, if not all, prior to any agreement researchers make to publish a work with a publisher.
- The NIH advises researchers to include the following language with their submitted article (likely with required funding acknowledgements) letting the publisher know about this license:
- "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."
- The NIH will NOT cover any fees charged by publishers to deposit the accepted version of the manuscript into PubMed Central.
- The American Chemical Society, which has announced a fee to deposit accepted versions, will not charge UNR authors through 2027 to do so. If the ACS attempts to charge any UNR researchers such a fee, researchers should contact their subject librarian.
- Some publishers might automatically direct articles marked as funded by the NIH into a pathway that will require they publish open access, which would likely require a fee to do so.
- The Authors Alliance has created a helpful guide for dealing with these situations.
All Department Policies
Each department's policy will include more detailed rules for researchers to follow, so please make sure to read the appropriate one in detail. You can see those changes on this guide from SPARC. A few things to consider in general:
- Some agencies have said they will factor in compliance with the public access policy in future grant decisions.
- Some agencies will allow publication in an open access journal in lieu of depositing your article in their specified repository, and many, if not all, will also let you include an OA journal publishing fee in your grant.
- Although most agencies require you to deposit at least the accepted manuscript (also called the final peer-reviewed article), they will also accept the final, published version.
- Some publishers will submit your article to the correct agencies. Check to see if yours offers this service.
- Some departments will specify which repository they want you to deposit your work in. If they do not, you can see about depositing your work in UNR's institutional repository, ScholarWolf. There is no fee to use it, and any university member may deposit in it.
