NARRATOR: Some of you may have been to a presentation I did a while back on this. This is a moving target. They're always adding and changing things, so hopefully you'll have--see some new things that NIH is doing with this compliance.
So briefly, this is what we're going to cover. We're gonna still go over the policy, especially for newbies who just came and where the compliance was dumped on them and they still don't even have a concept of what this NIH Public Access Policy is. We're going to talk about complying with it. I'm going to tell you how to submit a manuscript to the NIH Manuscript Submission System. You might hear the term NIHMS. We're going to talk about the NIH access policy and the grant process, and then the policy and eRA Commons. If you don't know about eRA Commons, I'll give you an explanation of what that is as we get to that part of the presentation.
So here is the announcement that went out. It first started as a mandate and then President Obama made it a requirement, so it has to be followed. Basically what it says is that anybody who produces a manuscript, a publication, that has been funded by an NIH grant is obliged and must deposit that peer-reviewed version of the manuscript into PubMed Central. There are some time frames. This went into effect April 7, 2008. So anything from that date forward that was published, that NIH grant funding was used, needs to be deposited. There is some confusion about 12 months. Twelve months is the embargo period. If... an author or Principle Investigator gets a notification from the journal 'We have accepted, we will be publishing this,' it's really a good idea to then start the compliance process. Because often if you wait too long, you can't find the version of the manuscript that you need to deposit, especially if it's a graduate student or a postdoc and they leave and you don't have the version that's necessary to deposit. And also, you need to comply with copyright when you're doing this deposit.
So PubMed Central. What is that? It's a repository, it's an archive that is part of the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine. It is a place where these items that you deposit are available. There's a permanent place that is free to anybody, that they can get the full text of the manuscript that you deposited. They do follow copyright. So that's--you'll hear the term PMC, PubMed Central--that's what that is. We'll see that in a minute. And the NIHMS, the National Institutes of Health deposit system, this is the portal where you start to deposit process. There's different ways of getting access to it, and I'm gonna show you that as we move forward. This is what it is. Everything NIH and NCBI or anything does, they're always saying, 'It makes it simpler.' Sometimes the person at the other end that needs to do it doesn't find it that simple. But that's their mantra, 'This makes it a simple, makes it easier.'