NIH Public Access Compliance: Additional Questions

For publications accepted before July 1, 2025, NIH Public Access Policy allows for up to a 12-month embargo on publications submitted to PubMed Central. An embargo is a delay, specified by the publisher, in when the publication can be made available in PubMed Central after the publication date. If a publication is subject to an embargo but has been deposited into PMC, it will not impact the compliance status of your publication.

If a publication has been given a PMCID but is subject to an embargo, generally the embargo is specified next to the PMCID on the PubMed entry. Here is an example:

NIH has said that only publications that are "in process" within 90 days of the Official Date of Publication will be considered provisionally compliant (for the purposes of an RPPR). Therefore, if a publication is "in process" with the manuscript submission system, but it is past the 90-day mark, you might see the non-compliant status in My NCBI and in eRA commons like the example below. 

There are multiple ways that a publication can be deposited into PubMed Central. Some publishers will deposit them automatically; others will conditionally deposit them. Some do not deposit publications at all. Thus, the responsibility falls on the authors of the publication to ensure that it is publicly-available in PubMed Central. 

If you publish in an open access journal or pay for a publication to be published open access, it does not always mean that your publication is automatically made publicly available in PubMed Central. Be sure to carefully read the journal’s public access policy and/or your publishing agreement to determine if a publication will be deposited for you. You can reach out to your contact at the journal or publisher to check if they will deposit the publication for you. 

You can always contact the author of this guide to get assistance with determining how your publication is to be deposited into PubMed Central. 

Yes.

• A preprint is version of the manuscript before peer review that has been posted to a preprint server like bioRxiv or Research Square. Even if a preprint version of the article was deposited into PubMed Central and given a PMCID, you still need to deposit the author's accepted manuscript of the final peer-reviewed publication into PubMed Central.
• A PMCID for a preprint cannot be used to demonstrate compliance for the final published version of the publication. 
• This means that the same publication might appear twice on an RPPR compliance report: the preprint version and the final peer-reviewed version (example below)

. 

There are three most common reasons for a citation to appear twice on an eRA Commons Compliance Report: 

1) Is one of them a preprint version of the paper?

• If your answer is yes, then you do not need to do anything. PubMed Central is running a pilot program where preprints of NIH-funded manuscripts are deposited into PMC. This often means that there are two different versions (the preprint and the final published version) reported on a grant progress report. See the box directly above this one for an example of what this looks like on a Compliance Report. 
• If your answer is no, then proceed to #2. 

2) A grant has more than one PI. Is this the case for the grant you are working on?

• If your answer is yes, then you do not need to do anything. eRA Commons is importing citations from more than one My Bibliography which can lead to publication duplication on an RPPR.
• If the answer is no, then proceed to #3. 

3) If there is only one PI on the grant, then there might be a duplicate citation of the publication in the My Bibliography, particularly if you had to manually enter the publication at some point in the past. The easiest way to address this is to search the My Bibliography for the publication (top right) and see how many citations are listed.

• If you have a manually-entered citation and a PubMed citation for the same publication, delete the manually-entered citation from your My Bibliography. It is always preferable to use the PubMed citation for a publication.
• There is also a chance that you have two manually-entered citations for the same publication. If this is the case, delete one of the citations. 

When you went to deposit a publication into NIHMS, you got a pop-up notification saying "Possible Duplicate". 

What does this mean?

This pop-up indicates that someone else has started the process of depositing the publication into NIHMS but has not completed the deposit. You might even see more than one duplicate listed for the title. It is important to note: that this notification does not mean that a publication has been deposited, but rather is in the process of being deposited.

If you try to submit a manuscript for an already-deposited publication, you will see something like this:

What should I do?

• If you are an author (or the delegate of an author) with all of the complete information (grants to link, etc.) and documents for the submission (author's accepted manuscript), you can absolutely click "Continue anyway" and complete the submission. Once a submission has been completed in NIHMS, the system should "lock out" any other attempts of depositing the publication by another author. 
• You can also reach out to the other authors of the publication to encourage them to complete the submission that they started. 
• This notification can also appear if the authors of a manuscript selected for the publisher to initiate the deposit of the author's associated manuscript (Method D) but the reviewing author has not yet reviewed and approved the deposit. 
  • If you think this might be the case, first check to see if the publisher is on the Method D Publishers List. 
  • Double-check your email to see if you missed a prompting email from the NIHMS Helpdesk to review a deposit. Generally, the publisher assigns the corresponding author as the reviewer of the manuscript.
  • If you are not a corresponding author but suspect that the publisher initiated the deposit of the manuscript, reach out to the corresponding author to see if they got a prompting email from NIHMS. 

If the "Provided by Publisher" pop-up appeared while you were trying to deposit a manuscript into NIHMS for a publication accepted before July 1, 2025, this indicates that the journal that the manuscript was published in is a Method A Compliance journal. This means that the publisher will automatically deposit the final, published manuscript into PubMed Central for you. You do not need to do anything but click "Cancel Submission". When the citation is linked to funding in the My Bibliography, it will appear as "PMC Journal - In Process" and be considered provisionally compliant on any RPPRs until the publisher's deposit has occurred.