Journal articles based on NIH-funded research will be subject to new federal regulations beginning April 7. The Office of the Vice-President for Research and Economic Development and the Lister Hill Library are working together to provide support for this process and to answer any questions investigators may have. Specifics on complying with the policy are available.

The NIH Public Access Web site (publicaccess.nih.gov/index.htm), and researchers are encouraged to review the information found there. The recently enacted NIH Public Access Policy requires that
• All articles arising from NIH funds must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, effective as of April 7; and
• NIH applications, proposals, and progress reports must include the PubMed Central reference number when citing an article that falls under the policy and is authored or co-authored by the investigator, or arose from the investigator's NIH award, effective May 25.

Submission of articles to PubMed Central
A number of journals already deposit articles on behalf of the author. A list of these journals can be found at publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm. Check this list for updates when preparing your article for submission.

If a journal that is not on the list above, you can do the deposit yourself or the Lister Hill Library can deposit it for you. Details of the submission process are online at publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process.htm for those who elect to submit the article personally. LHL soon will provide a protocol for those who desire to have them make the deposit.

In either case, you must verify that the copyright license agreement that you sign acknowledges that the article is subject to the NIH Policy and that you will be arranging for deposit of the paper in PubMed Central.

Draft language that can be used for this purpose will be available soon. In the meantime, the NIH suggests the following language: "Journal acknowledges that Author retains the right to provide a copy of the final manuscript to the NIH upon acceptance for Journal publication, for public archiving in PubMed Central as soon as possible but no later than 12 months after publication by Journal."

After the submission, proofs will sent to you from PubMed Central. You must respond to PubMed Central with any corrections before the manuscript will be officially entered into the database and issued a PubMed Central ID (PMCID) number.

Using the PubMed Central Identification Number
The law also requires "[a]s of May 25, NIH applications, proposals and progress reports must include the PubMed Central reference number when citing an article that falls under the policy and is authored or co-authored by the investigator, or arose from the investigator's NIH award."

In NIH applications and progress reports, be sure to add the PMCID number to articles on your biosketch (and those of your collaborators) that fall under the NIH policy.

Note that the PMCID is not the PMID number found on articles retrieved by searching the PubMed database. The PMCID will begin with the letters PMC. You can find the PMCID for papers by selecting the PMC database, rather than PubMed, when doing a PubMed author search at www.pubmed.gov.