Open Access

An Updated NIH and Publisher Guidance: What Authors Need to Know about NIH’s Public Access Policy

In June, we published an FAQ for authors and librarians to give some guidance on how they might respond to NIH’s accelerated implementation of its public access plan, which requires immediate availability of sponsored research articles upon publication. Our FAQ from June is still good advice, but since then both the NIH and several publishers have updated their guidance and so we are giving some additional information about the latest here.

NIH FAQ Flyer

Federal Agency Publication & Data Sharing Policy Overview & FAQ Events

In response to the 2022 Nelson Memo, federal agencies are required to update their public access policies by the end of this year. New policies are now in effect for several agencies: the NIH, CDC, AHRQ, DOE, and NASA. On August 5th at 1pm ET / 10am PT, Authors Alliance and SPARC will host a webcast focusing on new publications sharing requirements, providing an overview of key elements of these policies, highlighting the differences between them, and answering participants’ questions.  You can register for the August 5th event here.

NIH Building

The NIH Public Access Policy: Implementation and Feedback

The NIH Public Access Policy is in effect as of July 1, 2025. In response, Authors Alliance and SPARC have created a form to collect information about challenges or questions faced by authors, librarians and their institutions in complying with the roll out of new public access policies by federal grant making agencies in compliance with the OSTP directive to make federally funded research freely available to the public immediately upon publication. 

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