Managing Copyright for NIH Public Access
The Association of Research Libraries has made available the preprint of an article, Managing copyright for NIH Public Access: Strategies to ensure compliance, which was authored by Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University. Here is an excerpt of the article:
Compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy involves three distinct elements:
• First, authors must retain sufficient rights in their articles, even when (or if) they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers, to give NIH a license to make their work available in a publicly accessible database.
• Second, either the author or some entity acting on the author’s behalf must actually submit the article to PubMed Central. The principal author usually will need to verify that the final version of the article as “marked up” by PMC for digital release is correct.• Finally, the author(s) will need to obtain PMC reference numbers for their articles to include in subsequent documents submitted to NIH, as described above. Retention of sufficient rights in an article to allow PMC deposit is probably the most unfamiliar and challenging of these necessary parts of compliance. This analysis will focus, therefore, on this first element of compliance, and will outline three broad options that institutions and authors an pursue to ensure that copyright is managed in a way that will permit PMC deposit. …
The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) offers various online resources for author rights and copyright management.
P.S.: Cathy Sarli, a medical librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, has created a chart that explains to NIH-funded researchers when they need to comply with the
NIH Policy. She has also created a flowchart about the compliance process. Kudos to Cathy Sarli!
P.P.S.: Charles Bailey has pointed out that the library of the University of Rochester Medical Center offers a page that lists “publishers’ policies issued in response to NIH’s Public Access policy.”
