The NIH public access policy, which requires NIH grantees to provide a full text, electronic copy of their accepted articles to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication, has been in place since 2008. To encourage compliance with this requirement, NIH recently announced that it will “delay processing of non-competing continuation grant awards if publications arising from that award are not in compliance with the NIH public access policy.  The award will not be processed until recipients have demonstrated compliance.”  

NIH has made concurrent changes to the new Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) module as well, which will now create an automatically generated email alerting the grantee if the report includes non-compliant citations. Changes to both the award process and the RPPR module will be implemented in Spring 2013.

Recent changes have also been made to My NCBI that “improve the workflow and communication between PD/PIs and non- PD/PI authors”, making it easier for PD/PIs to track compliance of all papers arising from their awards, even if they do not author those papers. For details, visit the NLM Technical Bulletin.

In other NIH news, attend an upcoming webinar on December 13 to learn more about changes to the electronic submission process for multi-project applications. Several new FOAs are currently being published as part of the system pilot. Registration is required and space is limited!