New Mandate for NIH-Funded Manuscripts

As of April 7th, 2008, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are required to make their research publicly accessible by depositing their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to the NIH's open access digital archive, PubMed Central (PMC). This new mandate follows the voluntary policy - which was enacted in 2005 - as a renewed effort to make important research available to the public.

The new policy states that all investigators funded by the NIH must submit or have submitted for them to PMC an electronic version of their manuscripts upon acceptance for publication no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.

The AGA Institute journals, Gastroenterology and Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, along with their publisher, Elsevier, will deposit accepted NIH-funded manuscripts on the behalf of authors, thus relieving them of the burden to comply with this new policy. The only action required of authors of such papers is to provide the NIH grant number on the journals' copyright assignment form at the time of submission (see the portion of the form that reads, "National Institutes of Health (NIH) Funding). Once Elsevier has deposited an article, authors will receive an email from the NIH containing a PMC-formatted article for approval.

For more information on the new NIH policy, visit the NIH public access Web site at www.publicaccess.nih.gov.