Protecting Your NIH Funding: New Public Access Policy
If you have or want a career in academic biomedical or basic science research in areas that impact human health then your career depends on funding. For health related research the NIH is your bread and butter. You publish papers as a graduate student and post doc, get some expertise in a certain area, apply for funding, get funding, do research, publish more papers, apply for more grants; you get the picture.
Unfortunately for academic scientists the grant environment has become quite hostile lately. NIH appropriations have become flat in the face of a greater number of researchers, more expensive technologies, an economy that for all intents and purposes is in a recession, and ridiculous fuel costs (yes, that is germane as many suppliers now are applying a fuel surcharge to orders). Basically the same sum of money with decreased buying power is being split amongst a growing number of people doing more expensive research. Unfortunately this means fewer grants are being funded and fewer funded grants are being renewed. Every edge you can get in getting or maintaining a grant is important, which is why the new NIH public access policy is important.
The most important highlights of the new policy is that any NIH supported research published in a peer-reviewed journal must have the final accepted manuscript deposited in PubMed Central with in 12 months of publication. The up side is an increased in accessibility to people that don’t have the advantage of being at an institution with a million different site licenses for journals. The downside is, of course, more work for the researcher. The following types of papers are subject to the new policy per the faq:
The Policy applies to any manuscript that:
- Is peer-reviewed;
- And, is accepted for publication in a journal on or after April 7, 2008;
- And, arises from:
- Any direct funding 1 from an NIH grant or cooperative agreement active in Fiscal Year 2008, or;
- Any direct funding from an NIH contract signed on or after April 7, 2008, or;
- Any direct funding from the NIH Intramural Program, or;
- An NIH employee
Complying with the new access policy is part of the terms of agreement for any NIH award from now on, so be sure before you sign any copyright agreements to have papers published that the agreement wouldn’t prevent you from depositing the work in PubMed Central within the timelimit. Furthermore, references to your own published works in NIH grant proposals must include a PubMed Central ID (PMCID).
Don’t forget to stay in compliance with this policy, or the big bad NIH administrators may sneak out of your closet in the night and freeze your funding.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:33 am
[...] Previously I tried to get the word out on a change to the NIH policy for grant supported research that required researchers to transfer a copy of the final work to a repository (PMC) that provides free access to the article. My personally biased opinion is the policy was a great move, and that making scientific knowledge more highly available to everyone is a good thing. [...]