To determine your papers' compliance status, you need to look in the right place. The rest of this page will walk you through that, but in brief, here are the steps:
If you don't have access to the My Bibliography and want to quickly check for a PMCID, click this link.
The NCBI has recently updated the process for logging in to My NCBI. If you are having difficulties, please contact the author of this guide for assistance with logging in.
Step 1. Navigate to the myNCBI sign-in page, at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/account/
Step 2. Sign in by clicking on the eRA Commons button. It is important that you do not sign in with your NIH Login, otherwise you will not be able to view the grant affiliations below.
The publication is compliant. No further steps are needed. Include its PMCID in your grant applications, resubmissions, and progress reports.
The publication is in process. There are several pathways for a publication to be in process, so you might observe one of the three statuses pictured above. You do not need to do anything other than check back in a couple of weeks to confirm that it has shifted to green. You can use the assigned NIHMS ID in grant applications, resubmissions, and progress reports. Once the publication has been assigned a PMCID, you must use that in the place of the NIHMS ID.
This means that the publication is non-compliant and you must take steps immediately to bring it into compliance. Failure to do so can delay receipt of funding from grants and awards.
You can begin the compliance process directly from My Bibliography by selecting "Edit Status" and following the prompts. If you need any assistance, please contact the author of this guide as soon as possible. The NIH can take several weeks to apply a PMCID, so it is best not to wait until the last possible moment.
This status means that funding has not been associated with this publication. If you are certain that an award should be linked to a publication, select the blue "Add Award" button and follow the prompts. Please note: it is a very involved process to remove an award from a publication once it has been associated with it. Therefore, only add awards for yourself, and always do so with caution.
If a paper is not subject to the Public Access Compliance regulations, it should be marked as Not applicable- exempted. A paper may be exempted if it was not a result of any NIH funding, wasn't peer-reviewed, or is written in a script other than Latin (ie. Russian or Korean). Preprints that are not indexed in PubMed will have this status. If you are unsure if a paper should fall under the Public Access Compliance regulations, contact the author of this guide for an individual consultation.
If you do not have access to a PI's "My Bibliography", you can still check for a PMCID to demonstrate compliance by searching for the publication in PubMed. All articles that have been deposited into PubMed Central have a PubMed citation entry, even if the journal in which they are published is not indexed in MEDLINE. If a publication has successfully been deposited in PubMed Central, the PMCID will be listed under the authors and their affiliations and above the abstract.
In the example below, the PMCID is highlighted with a blue box. It is important to not confuse the PMCID with the PMID. These are two different numbers. The PMID will always appear first and is covered by a red X in the example below. The PMCID will always start with PMC.
