Public Access A Guide For Corresponding Authors

Leo Migdal

-Dec 5, 2025, 5:06 PM

public access a guide for corresponding authors

By December 31, 2025, researchers who receive funds from U.S. federal funding agencies will be required to comply with updated #publicaccess policies—and this impact stretches to authors worldwide who collaborate with federally funded researchers. Are you ready for the change? Our guide can help: https://go.acs.org/dw5 We’ve received many questions from authors, librarians, and research administrators about the NIH decision to accelerate implementation of its public access plan, going into effect on July 1, 2025. The policy will now require all NIH grantees to deposit research articles upon acceptance, for immediate public availability on the date of publication through the NIH public access repository, PubMed Central.

Below are some responses to questions we’ve received: The NIH revision of policy NOT-OD-25-101 states that “Author Accepted Manuscripts […] with acceptance dates on or after July 1, 2025, are subject to the Policy.” If an author signs a publisher agreement that... This is a realistic problem given some publishers’ workflows where, for example, they require authors to agree and select up-front, upon submission, how they would like their article published (open access or not), which... But to be clear, neither the funding date nor the submission date impacts the applicability of the policy—the policy only applies to articles accepted on or after July 1. Several major commercial publishers (including mega-publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature) per their publicly stated policies, at present require embargos for deposit of articles in public access repositories, and there are no indications that these publishers... This creates a contradictory policy environment: the NIH policy gives authors the obligation (policy mandate1) and the NIH obtains the right (via the federal purpose license2) to make an immediate repository deposit.

At the same time, publishers may of course set their own policies. For instance, a publisher can decide to refuse publication of an article that carries a pre-existing contractual burden such as an immediate deposit requirement (either from a sponsor or employing institution), or they impose... It is important to stress that how these publishers might enforce their policy positions remains an open question, and of course their positions could evolve over time. In response to the 2022 OSTP memo, U.S. federal agencies now require authors to deposit their manuscripts into agency repositories, often immediately upon acceptance by a journal. Agencies do not charge a fee for authors to deposit their manuscripts, making this an easy and cost-effective compliance option.

However, in response to this new federal requirement, some journal publishers now require authors who receive U.S. federal funding to pay publishing fees. These fees have caused concern and confusion among researchers with federal funding. This places authors in a situation where they must carefully consider publisher policies and fee requirements before making the decision about where to publish their work. It is important to understand that many publishers freely allow manuscript deposit into repositories without imposing additional charges on federally funded authors. However, many authors were not aware of these fees when they submitted their articles for publication and find themselves having to make decisions about what to do late in the publication process—sometimes after peer...

SPARC developed this guide to help authors consider potential actions they might take at different stages of the funding lifecycle, along with additional resources they might find helpful. Expand each section to learn more. Tip 1. Understand your funder(s)’ requirements Home » Scholarly Communication Topics » Funder Public Access Policies » Guidance on the Revised NIH Public Access Policy, Effective July 2025 In 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo requiring all federal agencies to develop or revise their respective agency policies to make journal articles and data arising...

OSTP requires that these new or revised federal funding agency policies go into effect no later than December 31, 2025. Implementation details and guidance will vary; see your funder’s website for more details. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has revised its Public Access Policy effective July 1, 2025. (Originally, this revised policy had an effective date of December 31, 2025, but in April NIH moved that date to July.) See below for details about how to comply with the NIH policy. Note: this page provides guidance for articles only; all data management and sharing requirements remain covered by the 2023 NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy. We will update this page as we learn what additional guidance may be provided by NIH, and how publishers respond to the policy.

For assistance interpreting federal public access policies, please contact your subject librarian or librarians who specialize in a specific area of the policies. The specialist librarians are Stephen Wolfson for copyright and licensing, and Lauren Phegley for data management and data sharing. You can also use the web form below to get in touch with a subteam of librarians who answer questions about federal public access policies. The NIH public access policy went into effect on July 1, 2025, and governs any author accepted manuscript accepted for publication in a journal that is the result of funding by NIH in whole... Author accepted manuscripts meeting this qualification and with acceptance dates on or after July 1, 2025, are subject to the Policy. In short, the Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH-funded research.

It requires authors to submit final peer reviewed journal manuscripts that result from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central. The Policy requires that these final peer reviewed manuscripts be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health. Note that “Noncompliance with the NIH Public Access Policy may be considered by NIH regarding future funding decisions for the recipient institution (e.g., as authorized in the NIH GPS 8.5, Specific Award Conditions and... Non-competing continuation grant awards are subject to a delay in award processing for noncompliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.” Public Access Policy refers to a series of open access mandates which apply to most taxpayer-funded research in the United States. Before 2024, only the largest federal agencies had public access policies, and allowed authors a 12-month "embargo" period between the publication of their article and making it publicly available in the agency's institutional repository.

However, the 2022 "Nelson" Memo removed the 12-month embargo period, requiring immediate ("zero embargo") public access to federally funded research. The NIH Public Access Policy applies to articles accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025. Some other agencies have already released guidance, and all federal agencies are expected to release updated public access policies by December 31, 2025. For agency-specific guidance, please refer to the following guides: The Government Use License (2 CFR 200.315), sometimes referred to as the Federal Purpose License, is the federal regulation that allows agencies to enact public access policies. In most cases, the grant recipient or subrecipient retains copyright of their work, but must grant the federal agency this non-exclusive right as part of the grant agreement.

Under this license, "[t]he Federal agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes and to authorize others to do so. This includes the right to require recipients and subrecipients to make such works available through agency-designated public access repositories." More specifically, the Government Use License grants federal agencies the right to: The Government Use License is also described in 45 CFR 75.322, which is incorporated by reference in every NIH grant agreement, which means it applies to all NIH grants even if the agreement was... The specifics of how this non-exclusive license is used depends on the granting agency, but it is likely to be very similar for all U.S. federal agencies. Communication among coauthors is essential while preparing the manuscript for publication.

The NIH has three statements authors should include in the manuscript to indicate they are NIH funded and have the right to deposit manuscripts to PubMed Central: If you are not preparing the manuscript yourself for submission to the journal, make sure the first author/corresponding author has included these statements, as well as all NIH award numbers which supported your work. If you are preparing the manuscript for submission to the journal, extend the same courtesy to your coauthors: ask them if they were NIH funded for their roles and ask them to supply you... Communication with the journal upon submission of the manuscript for review and publication can be more complicated. The submitting / corresponding author should: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) defines Open Access as "free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment." Open Access...

Public Access policies are directives that federally funded research must be made freely accessible to the public, typically without an embargo period, allowing immediate access to final, peer-reviewed manuscripts in agency-designated repositories. The United States’ Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Nelson Memo, released in 2022, mandated that scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research will be free to read immediately upon publication, ensuring that... Additionally, under Public Access policies, grantees provide agencies with rights to the accepted manuscript that are equivalent to those of the Federal Purpose License (“A royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or... Open Access, in contrast, refers to a publishing model where scholarly articles are freely accessible, while authors retain their copyright and can specify how their work is reused. Researchers or their institutions, however, may be required to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make the copy-edited published versions of their articles available, or to adhere to publisher restrictions (such as an embargo)... As one part of its mission to support open knowledge, Lehigh University Libraries have entered into a number of Open Access publishing agreements with major publishers.

These agreements bundle subscription access to journals with the right for Lehigh-affiliated corresponding authors to publish eligible, accepted articles as Open Access, and may be referred to as "transformative," "transitional," or "read and publish"... Call the Wilson Library front desk to get help by phone during open hours, or leave a voicemail for next-day follow-up. Use the web form to email us. We respond within 1 to 2 business days. Real people, no bots. All day and night, with help from librarians everywhere.

Public Access A Guide For Corresponding Authors

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