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Public Access Policies: Article & Data Sharing Requirements

A Research Guide explaining federal public access policies.

Researchers who receive federal funding are required to make any peer reviewed articles resulting from funding publicly available. In order to comply, author(s) will need to deposit their article in an agency designated repository. Authors may choose to publish their work open access (OA) to comply with their funder policy but are not required to.*

*Note: Some publishers/journals are requiring federally funded researchers to pay fees or publish OA with an APC. These are fees and policies the publishers have chosen to impose on federally funded researchers. Federal Agencies do not require OA publication or charge fees for repository deposit.

Agency Designated Repository Deposit

Federally funded author(s) must deposit their peer reviewed articles in an agency repository e.g. NIH's PubMed Central. Authors may submit the author accepted manuscript (AAM)* version of their article or the final publisher version. Typically, the final publisher version can be shared only if it is published OA (see OA publishing options below).

UW Libraries has created a helpful chart with which repository to submit to for each agency (select the link below):

Check Publisher Policies

Since NIH, NSF, and other agencies have updated their public access policies to eliminate the 12 month embargo, some publishers have changed their policies to prohibit zero embargo repository deposit of the Accepted Manuscript without paying fees. Check your publisher's policy before submission to ensure that you can comply with you funder mandates.

Consider one of the many publishers that are allowing authors to comply with their funder mandates without charging fees:

Manuscript Versions Infographic by Karen Caputo

*Author accepted manuscript (AAM): the version of the article after it’s been through peer review, including any improvements resulting from that process, and has been accepted by the journal’s editor. It does not include any copyediting, typesetting and proof correction. This is sometimes referred to as the post-print version.

Open Access (OA) Publishing Options:

  • Agency Pays. Author(s) may be able to ask their funding agency to cover the costs of OA publishing. Authors who go this route will need to ask for this funding when applying.
  • No APC Journal. Author(s) may choose to publish in a Diamond OA journal which does not charge publishing fees (APCs) to publish. Visit the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), search for journals in your area, then select the "Without article processing charges (APCs)" filter to find these journals.
  • CWRU OA Publishing Agreements. CWRU authors may choose to publish OA freely under one of CWRU OA Publishing Agreements (see link below). CWRU has agreements with select publishers such as Wiley, Cambridge, and IOP.

Why Choose OA Publishing?

  • Because you want to share the final published version of your article
  • Because you want to have an open license (like a CC-BY) that encourages reuse and sharing
  • Because OA publishing helps increase equity and transparency in research

Definitions

  • Author Accepted Manuscript. the version of the article after it’s been through peer review, including any improvements resulting from that process, and has been accepted by the journal’s editor. It does not include any copyediting, typesetting and proof correction. This is sometimes referred to as the post-print version. This is typically the version of the article that federal funders ask for, and many publishing contracts grant the author more rights in this version than in the Final Published Article.
  • Author Warranties/Representations. Most publishing contracts will include a section titled Author Warranties or Author Representations, which contains a series of statements that the author must agree with in order to sign the contract. Authors grant the NIH a "non-exclusive license" by accepting a funding award, so any contract requiring that the article is not subject to any previous licenses is inconsistent with the NIH Grants Policy Statement. However, NIH-funded authors can agree that they have not previously granted any exclusive licenses, because the Government Use License is non-exclusive.
  • Self-archiving rights (Green OA). Authors can comply if they retain the right to "self-archive" or "deposit" their Author Accepted Manuscript or Final Published Article in the funder-designated repository. Publishing contracts often allow authors to self-archive in some places (e.g., a personal website, a noncommercial repository), but prohibit self-archiving in others. Authors should make sure that they have the right to self-archive in the funder-designated repository.
  • Zero embargo. Under the previous Public Access Policy, authors were allowed a 12-month "embargo" period before their article had to be made publicly available, and many publishers' policies still require an embargo. In order to comply with the new policy, authors need to make sure that the publisher allows them to make their Author Accepted Manuscript available immediately upon publication, i.e., with a "zero embargo." 

Real World Experiences