The federal grants landscape continues to evolve. One update regarding public access to government-funded research goes into effect July 1, six months earlier than previously announced. 

The background: In 2022, the Office of Science and Technology Policy announced requirements that science funding agencies make articles available for access by the public without the 12-month embargo (or delay) that federally-funded research articles currently experience. As a result, the National Institutes of Health created a policy to require NIH-funded researchers to file their research articles for release to the public by the time of publication, without the 12-month embargo. This no-embargo policy was to have gone into effect at the end of the calendar year, but the effective date is now July 1. The new policy will apply to all articles accepted for publication on or after this date.

In the NIH, public access is managed through PubMed Central (PMC), a service of the National Library of Medicine, which makes the full-text of articles available and links them to PubMed. There are multiple submission methods for researchers to deposit their articles.

The most popular current path is for journal editors to file articles on behalf of authors (officially called “Method A” in documentation). However, few publishers have said they will change to no-embargo filing as part of their services to authors. 

When the publisher won’t deposit a no-embargo article, faculty must deposit an Author Accepted Manuscript into PMC. The Author Accepted Manuscript, or AAM, is the last MS Word (or other word processor) version of the article after all peer review but before the publisher starts final layouts and copyedits. The AAM stage for researchers is a later stage than a preprint, but an earlier stage than what is finally published in journals. 

Faculty can manually deposit their AAM using the NIH Manuscript Submission system. The system helps update the researcher’s grant compliance and also processes the Word document and converts it into a file for PMC. That manual deposit process is free, but does take some time and requires mastering the system.

VCU Libraries’ Scholarly Communication and Publishing team and other libraries' subject liaisons are working to spread the word on campus about the July 1 change to NIH-funded faculty and the research staff who support them. 

Librarians will not manage the actual depositing process for researchers. They will provide coaching, resources and training about the public access policy. They can also consult with researchers to make sense of publisher policies and explain how journal licenses relate to the federal policy. Librarians can also help researchers find publishers who might file to PMC as part of an Open Access publishing agreement through a VCU Libraries or VIVA transformative agreement. 

Reach out to Scholarly Communications Librarian Katharine Miller or Research Data Librarian Nina Exner for more information or to schedule a training or consultation.