APA and NIH Enhanced Public Access

This notice provides important information about the NIH PubMed Central deposit request as it relates to articles published in APA journals.

The Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research, notice number NOT-OD-08-033, released on January 11, 2008, took effect April 7, 2008.

By this policy, NIH funded investigators (or their publisher) are required to deposit to PubMed Central (PMC) an electronic version of the final peer-reviewed manuscript upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available within 12 months of publisher's final publication date.

Mandatory Deposit
Deposit to PubMed is mandatory if your peer-reviewed manuscript was directly funded by a grant or cooperative agreement in Fiscal Year 2008 (October 1, 2007–September 30, 2008) or beyond. As defined by NIH, direct costs are those that "can be specifically identified with a particular project or activity."

Mandatory deposit is also required if your peer-reviewed manuscript is directly funded by an NIH contract signed on or after April 7, 2008, is directly funded by the NIH Intramural Program, or is the product of your employment with NIH.

Voluntary Deposit
Deposit to PubMed is voluntary if the NIH-funded empirical research was accepted for publication after May 2, 2005, or was funded by a grant or cooperative agreement prior to September 30, 2007.

Deposit of manuscripts is also voluntary if the manuscript is based on research funded by contract award before April 7, 2008.

No material published and copyrighted with any scientific scholarly publisher prior to May 2, 2005, should be deposited in PMC without the express permission of the publisher, because of pre-existing copyright transfers and earlier legal understanding.

APA will deposit appropriate manuscripts on behalf of the authors. Authors publishing in APA or EPF journals should NOT personally and directly deposit Word documents of APA accepted manuscripts or APA published articles in PMC. As the copyright holder, APA will deposit the final accepted manuscript at acceptance to be made available 11 1/2 months after the actual publication date of the article.

To assist with the deposit process, please provide your grant information on the deposit request form. Once deposited, the NIH Submission System will notify the Principal Investigator that the manuscript has been successfully submitted and an NIH Manuscript Submission reference number (NIHMS ID) will be assigned.

Complete and submit a PMC depositing request to APA Journals (PDF: 20KB).

What version will be used? The final "Word" version of the author generated manuscript after all changes based on peer-review editorial feedback and as accepted by the editor is the defined document NIH requests. APA retains this copy and will deposit it at the appropriate time. The final APA typeset article version as officially printed in the journal, which is fully copyrighted by APA, cannot be placed in any depository.

What articles are covered?
The NIH policy only applies to peer-reviewed journal articles, including research reports and reviews—not correspondence, book chapters, conference proceedings, or editorials.

Certain aspects of the NIH guidelines remain unclear and will hopefully be addressed by NIH in response to the public comments received to its "Request for Information: NIH Public Access Policy," which was published in the Federal Register on March 31, 2008, with a 60-day comment period.

More details will be added to this notice as issues are resolved. It should also be noted that NIH funded research articles are eligible for article/page charge payments from research grants.