The NIH Public Access Policy Changed on 1 July 2025

The revision takes effect for papers accepted on or after that date. Papers accepted earlier fall under the previous policy, which permitted up to a twelve-month embargo. In practice the simplest position is to deposit everything on acceptance from now on rather than maintaining two processes, because the cost of the stricter behaviour is a few minutes and the cost of applying the wrong rule to the wrong paper is a compliance finding at renewal.

The version of your paper that incorporates every change made during peer review, as accepted by the journal, and before the publisher has copy-edited or typeset it. It is your file, not theirs. It is not the version you first submitted, and it is not the published PDF. Save it at the moment of acceptance, because reconstructing it afterwards means reading the proofs against your last revision and rebuilding the differences by hand.

NIH is explicit that deposit is free to the author and that publishers may not levy differential charges for compliance with the policy. A journal is still free to charge an article processing charge for open access publication, which is a different thing — that is a charge for publishing the final version openly, not a charge for depositing your own manuscript.

No. The obligation attaches to the deposit rather than to the venue, and a subscription journal remains a legitimate choice. What has changed is that a journal whose terms make depositing the accepted manuscript awkward now costs you more than it did, so the question is worth asking during journal selection rather than after acceptance.

The strictest rule that applies to you is the one that binds. A paper with NIH and Horizon Europe funding has to satisfy both, which means immediate deposit of the accepted manuscript and a CC BY licence and a journal whose charges are reimbursable under the European rules. That combination narrows the list of realistic journals considerably, and it narrows it before you write rather than after.

PubMed Central issues it once the deposit is processed. It matters because it is the identifier NIH asks for in progress reports, renewals and new applications — a DOI is not a substitute. Recording it when it is issued, rather than looking for it under deadline, is one of those small habits that quietly removes a recurring problem.

We handle the part that causes the trouble: preparing the accepted manuscript version correctly, checking the journal’s terms before you submit rather than after, and writing the funding and licence statements so they match what the funder and the journal each expect. The deposit itself runs through your own institutional or NIH account, as it should.