NIH Public Access Policy 2025

The NIH Public Access Policy does not require authors to pay a fee, such as an article processing charge for open access. The updated policy continues to allow reasonable publication costs as part of the project budget.

However, you should read your publication agreement carefully; some publishers offer a route to compliance through the payment of an Article Publishing Charge (APC), which can be expensive. Penn State's Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright has created a list of publishers that by default allow deposit of some version of your article, typically the author's accepted manuscript without embargo. Generally, these publishers' policies should be compatible with the federal funders' zero embargo policy. 

Several publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, have changed their policies to only permit authors to comply with the NIH Public Access mandate by selecting Gold Open Access publishing options and paying the corresponding Article Publishing Charge. Other publishers, such as Wolters Kluwer, appear to continue to permit their authors to comply with the NIH Public Access mandate without additional payment. 

You can find more details in the changes to publishers policies tab. 

Rights you are granting to the NIH 

Upon accepting NIH funding, recipients grant to NIH the right to make Author Accepted Manuscripts resulting from the funding publicly available in PubMed Central upon the Official Date of Publication. This is the Government Use License, also known as the Federal Purpose License. For more information about the Federal Purpose License, please see this factsheet from the Higher Educational Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship.

NIH encourages, but does not require, authors to indicate in their Submitted Manuscript that, if it is accepted, NIH has a license to make the Accepted Manuscript publicly available upon the Official Date of Publication. In its guidance on the government use license, NIH provides the following sample language for this purpose:

This manuscript is the result of funding in whole or in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy. Through acceptance of this federal funding, NIH has been given a right to make this manuscript publicly available in PubMed Central upon the Official Date of Publication, as defined by NIH.

Some journals require payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC), page charges, color image charges etc, to publish in the journal. You are generally allowed to use grants funds for those costs. However, the NIH has outlined several unallowable costs: 

• Journal or publisher fees that arise during the course of the publication process for the sole purpose of submitting the Author Accepted Manuscript to PubMed Central ​
• Costs for services (e.g., peer review) for which there is no resulting, publicly available product
• Costs for services incurred after closeout of the award, even for an Author Accepted Manuscript subject to the NIH Public Access Policy
• Costs for publishing services that are charged differentially because an Author Accepted Manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy or the work is the result of NIH funding

The WVU Libraries are committed to Open Access in order to maximize the reach and impact of research produced at WVU. As part of those efforts we have entered into a number of agreements that allow you to publish Open Access for free or with a negotiated discount. You can find more information about those agreements in the Open Access @WVU tab in this guide and our Open Access Research Publishing website.