On April 30, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it was moving up the effective date for its updated Public Access Policy to July 1, 2025. The 2024 NIH Public Access Policy, as initially described in the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directive often called the “Nelson Memo,” was originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025. Aside from the accelerated timeline, the essentials have not changed.

Important highlights of the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy:

• The revised date will impact manuscripts resulting from NIH funds and accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025. This is true regardless of when the grant was funded, and thus will apply to many manuscripts resulting from NIH funds awarded before July 1.
• The manuscript acknowledgments must include a reference to the NIH grant number.
• The Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) — the final, peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication — resulting from NIH funds must be deposited immediately in the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS) and PubMed Central (PMC). Journal publishers may no longer impose an embargo period on these AAMs.
• The updated policy does not mandate that authors publish in a fully open access journal (Gold Open Access) or hybrid open access journal, and does not require authors to pay any fees to comply with the policy, such as paying an article processing charge (APC).
• Authors may still opt to include allowable publication fees as in/direct costs in their award budgets; however, the following costs are not allowable:
  • If a journal attempts to charge authors a special fee for having NIH funding and/or complying with the NIH Public Access Policy.
  • If a journal charges an NIH-funded author an APC when Brown already has an institutional agreement that waives APCs for that journal.

Brown University provides support for authors in complying with the NIH Public Access Policy.

The experts in the Office of Sponsored Projects (OSP) can answer questions about budgeting, direct or indirect, for allowable publication costs, and about compliance with the terms, conditions, and contracts of researchers’ NIH awards.

Health and Biomedical Library Services (HBLS) partners with the Division of Research to assist authors with manuscript requirements. This includes using My NCBI and My Bibliography to manage NIH-funded publications and uploading their Author Accepted Manuscripts to the NIH Manuscript Submission system (NIHMS) and PMC. See the HBLS guide to the NIH Public Access Policy for more details, and email HealthSciLibrarians@brown.edu with any questions.