The NIH Public Access Policy requires that the final peer-reviewed manuscript describing research funded by NIH must be submitted to PubMedCentral immediately upon acceptance for publication, and the entire manuscript must be freely available in PubMedCentral no later than 12 months after first publication.
The policy sounds like authors need to be concerned once an article is accepted. However, to ensure compliance, authors must review a proposed journal's policies before submitting to determine if they allow you to comply with this policy, negotiate the terms of copyright transfer forms before signing to ensure you retain the right to deposit the paper into PubMedCentral, and list your NIH grant number in all manuscripts. Noncompliance with the NIH Public Access Policy can lead to reduced opportunities for future federal funding.
Depending on the journal that will publish your manuscript, the publisher of the journal or the author might be responsible for submitting the article to PubMedCentral. Review the resources below to determine how to submit your articles.
Adopted in 2016, NSF's access policy states that when a NSF-funded article is accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, either the version of record or the final accepted manuscript must be deposited in the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) no later than 12 months after original publication.
To ensure compliance, authors must review a proposed journal's policies before submitting to determine if they allow you to comply with this policy, negotiate the terms of copyright transfer forms before signing to ensure you retain the right to deposit the paper into this repository, and list your NSF grant number in all manuscripts.
Unlike the NIH Public Access Policy, the funded investigator who authored the paper must manage all steps of the depositing process. Once you have a PDF copy of your paper, you must sign in to the NSF User System and upload the PDF.
You can negotiate for the rights you want or need when publishing journal articles.
Authors typically sign a copyright transfer form or copyright agreement form when submitting an article. These commonly prohibit you from activities you might want or need to do: depositing copies of the article into repositories like PubMed Central; sending copies to colleagues; sharing a copy on your own website; re-using images or substantial parts of the text in any other publications or presentations. Open Access publishing schemes typically allow authors to retain more rights relating to deposit, sharing, and re-use.
You can negotiate the copyright agreement form with the publisher to retain the rights you want to keep. If the funder of your research requires you to comply with Public Access Mandates to deposit your publications into a repository, you MUST negotiate with publishers to ensure you have the right to do this. One way to start this negotiation is to provide a addendum to the publisher-provided copyright form.