NIH-funded science must now be free to read instantly: what you should know Nature talks to specialists about how to comply

US biomedical agency’s public-access policy kicks in on 1 July

The US National Institutes of Health’s Gateway Center is the main visitor entrance to the agency’s campus in Bethesda, Maryland.Credit: Briscoe Savoy for *Nature*

From 1 July, researchers funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be required to make their scientific papers available to read for free as soon as they are published in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s according to the agency’s latest public-access policy, aimed at making federally funded research accessible to taxpayers.

Established under former US president Joe Biden, the policy was originally set to take effect on 31 December for all US agencies, but the administration of Biden’s successor, Donald Trump, has accelerated its implementation for the NIH, a move that has surprised some scholars. That’s because, although the Trump team has declared itself a defender of taxpayer dollars, it has also targeted programmes and research projects focused on equity and inclusion for elimination. And one of the policy’s main goals is to ensure equitable access to federally funded research.

The move means that universities will have less time to advise their researchers on how to comply with the policy, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There is usually “some confusion or even some non-compliance after a new policy takes effect, but I think universities will eventually get on top of that”, he says.

The NIH policy has been welcomed by open-access (OA) advocates, and reflects a global shift towards making publicly funded research freely available. Since 2021, several European science agencies that provide funding for researchers have required grant holders to make their papers OA immediately.

Here, Nature asks publishing specialists what researchers need to know about the NIH policy.

What is the new policy?

Scientific papers that result from projects funded by the NIH must be deposited in the agency’s digital repository, PubMed Central, and made freely available there immediately after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Previously, the NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, allowed journals to restrict access to papers for an embargo period of up to 12 months before making them publicly available in PubMed Central. The policy applies to manuscripts accepted for publication on or after 1 July, and the version deposited can be either the ‘accepted’ manuscript (including all revisions resulting from the peer-review process) or the final published article.

What options do authors have?

Scientists can take one of several routes to make their papers immediately free to read. For authors already publishing in an OA journal (or the OA portion of a hybrid journal), the policy brings little change: when researchers’ papers are posted online by the journal, they are made freely available to readers. These authors just need to ensure that their papers are deposited in PubMed Central as soon as they are published. And “if you’re publishing open access, a lot of those publishers have mechanisms in place to do the deposit for you”, says Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian and academic at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Authors publishing in closed-access journals (or the closed sections of hybrid journals), which require people to have a subscription to read papers, will be most affected by the change, Hinchliffe says. Researchers will have to make sure that the agreement they sign with the publisher complies with the NIH policy, meaning that they are allowed to deposit the full version of the paper in PubMed Central without embargo. They might also need to submit the paper to PubMed Central themselves, because some publishers have indicated that they will not offer this service.

What issues might researchers encounter?

Several publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, require that papers published in closed-access journals remain available only to subscribers for an embargo period — 6 or 12 months, for instance — before they can be placed in repositories such as PubMed Central (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature). “It’s very likely that not all publisher agreements will be compatible with the new policy, and that creates a difficult situation — both for the publisher and for the author,” Suber says.

These publishers might steer authors towards their OA journals (or the OA parts of their hybrid journals) to comply with the policy. However, OA journals make their money by asking for article-processing charges (APCs), which can be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Authors switching to publishing in an OA journal would be responsible for paying those APCs. This is what happened when Plan S — an OA initiative launched by a coalition of mostly European funders — went into effect, Hinchliffe says.

“Authors should know that in advance, and if they don’t want to pay the APC, but still want to comply with the NIH policy, then they have to go somewhere else,” Suber says.

Some authors might not need to worry about APCs, however. In preparation for the NIH policy coming into effect, some universities have been putting in place agreements with publishers that allow their researchers to publish OA papers at no cost to them, generally through contracts where universities shift funds previously spent on subscriptions to supporting OA publishing. The Big Ten Academic Alliance, a consortium of US research universities, announced one such agreement with Springer Nature last month. Not only are we prepared for the transition to OA, says Maurice York, director of Library Initiatives for the Big Ten alliance, but “it’s what we’ve been pushing for”.

Additionally, certain funders cover APCs. According to the NIH’s policy, the agency will allow authors to include ‘reasonable costs’ associated with publication, such as APCs, in their project budgets.