This came via the Stanford Medical Library’s newsletter, Lane Connexion (Vol. 4, Issue 2, Spring 2008).

NIH Public Access Policy and You

NIH-funded research results in the publication of approximately 80,000 articles annually.  On April 7, 2008 the NIH enacted a new Public Access Policy to ensure that the public has access to these results.  It requires scientists to submit journal articles arising from NIH funds to PubMed Central, a free online archive of full-text biomedical journal articles (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The new NIH reporting requirement provides an important opportunity to make published research funded by NIH and written by you and your colleagues accessible to all — the public, health care providers, educators and scientists around the world.

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The author must ensure that the publisher’s copyright agreement permits inclusion in the PubMed Central fulltext database before they sign it.  Stanford will provide a letter to include with your submission when a publisher does not explicitly acknowledge the PubMed Central reporting requirement in their agreement.

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For more, see the Lane Medical Library page, “National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Law in a Nutshell.”