Open access to science scholarship is about to become even more prevalent. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released a significant update to its Public Access Policy for NIH-funded research. Important changes are:
- All NIH-funded research published on or after December 31, 2025 must be publicly available in Pubmed Central (PMC) immediately upon publication. Researchers are responsible for ensuring a peer-reviewed open access version of their article is deposited in PMC, either via publication in a cooperating journal, or through self-deposit.
- All NIH-funded research, regardless of funding level, are beholden to the Policy.
- Accepted article types (the accepted manuscript or final published article) have been more clearly defined for authors.
You can read more about these requirements and methods of deposit in our library guide to the NIH Public Access Policy.
For many authors, a barrier to publication under an open access model has been the cost incurred via author publishing charges (ensuring publishing companies continue to profit from “free” research literature). Even where NIH funding makes budgeting for publication possible, authors may wish the dollars could be better spent directly on their research.
The updated NIH Policy emphasizes that authors do not have to pay to comply (it is free to deposit an NIH-funded, peer-reviewed author manuscript to PMC), but authors are also warned to adhere to their journal’s copyright agreement. The new policy explicitly requires that authors grant the NIH a license so that the manuscript can be made publicly accessible.
While the exact implications for journals remain unclear, these latest public access policy updates will open the literature up significantly for newly published (“current”) biomedical research, and further normalizes open as a method of access. Publishers may continue to shift toward exclusively Gold models for open access, if enough subscription revenue is affected by the new mandate. Gold open access affects research budgets and indirectly, taxpayers, as top-tier journals routinely charge upward of $10,000 per article in author processing charges.
A librarian can help authors understand and comply with the updated mandate, or seek low to no-cost routes to open access regardless of funding requirements. Get in touch with us.
You must be logged in to post a comment.