Authors With NIH Funding Must Submit Papers to PubMed Central

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From the Publisher of PEDIATRICS
Authors With NIH Funding Must Submit Papers to PubMed Central

January 29, 2008 -- Beginning in April, authors whose research is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) must comply with a new law that requires them to submit their papers to a federal online archive. The archive is based at the National Library of Medicine and is called PubMed Central.

The law requires that authors submit (or have submitted for them) an electronic copy of the final, peer-reviewed manuscript with figures and supplemental materials when it is accepted for publication in a journal. The manuscript will be made available for free to the public no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.

This requirement will affect a number of authors publishing in PEDIATRICS. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), publisher of the journal, is reviewing the details of the new law and is investigating whether the journal itself will make the submissions for authors.

Links to Key Web Sites

More information about the new law is available at grants.nih.gov
Science published an overview of the policy (Uncle Sam's Biomedical Archive Wants Your Papers. Science. 2008:319:266 www.sciencemag.org)
PubMed Central offers detailed information for authors about the submission process

PEDIATRICS' Open Access Policy

Articles published in PEDIATRICS are available free online to the public one year after publication. This policy applies to all articles, not just those based on NIH-funded research. (The articles remain open to the public for eight years, after which they are under access control.)

PEDIATRICS' articles subject to the new law that are deposited in PubMed Central will not be available to the public until 12 months after the official publication date, but will remain freely available in perpetuity thereafter.

Why does PEDIATRICS keep articles under access control for one year? The journal has adopted this publishing model to help sustain subscription revenue, which supports the AAP and its programs, and to preserve the value of the content as a member benefit. Some sections of the journal are always free to any reader. These are:

Table of contents for each issue
Abstracts for all articles
All statements in the "From the American Academy of Pediatrics" section
Articles published only in the online edition

Policies of Other Funding Entities

Authors whose work has been funded by the Wellcome Trust or the Howard Hughes Medical Institute are required to publish in journals that allow articles to be available free to the public within six months of publication. The AAP is looking into how to accommodate this requirement. One possible solution is to charge authors a fee so that their articles could be made free online upon publication.

AAP Welcomes Feedback

PEDIATRICS' editors and staff welcome feedback from authors on our policies. To submit a comment, please contact Kerry O'Rourke, Senior Managing Editor, at korourke{at}aap.org or 847-434-7895.