NIH Public Access Policy

The NIH Public Access Policy is the official name of the National Institutes of Health’s requirement that peer-reviewed manuscripts arising from NIH-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) and made publicly available there. It is a distinct, named federal policy with its own regulatory history — not a synonym for “open access” in general, and not the same policy as NIH’s separate 2023 Data Management and Sharing Policy (see below). The current version of the policy, the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy, took effect on July 1, 2025 and eliminated the 12-month embargo that had applied since 2008, requiring immediate, zero-embargo public availability instead.

What the policy requires

Under the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy, any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) that results, in whole or in part, from NIH funding and is accepted for publication in a journal on or after July 1, 2025 must be:

• Submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, typically via the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system;
• Made publicly available in PMC with zero embargo — that is, at the article’s Official Date of Publication, not delayed by any subsequent holding period; and
• Cited by its resulting PMCID in any NIH application, progress report, or Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) that references the publication.

Manuscripts accepted for publication before July 1, 2025 remain governed by the prior (2008) policy: they still had to be deposited in PMC, but the publisher was permitted to embargo public visibility there for up to 12 months after the official publication date. A researcher checking an older publication’s compliance status should apply the rules in force on its acceptance date, not the current zero-embargo rule.

The policy applies to the Author Accepted Manuscript specifically — the author’s final, peer-reviewed text as accepted by the journal, not the publisher’s typeset version of record and not an earlier preprint.

A brief history: voluntary request, legal mandate, zero embargo

The policy has gone through three distinct phases:

• 2005 — voluntary request. NIH finalized a voluntary policy (NOT-OD-05-022, issued February 3, 2005) asking, not requiring, NIH-funded investigators to submit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts to PMC. Beginning May 2, 2005, investigators were “requested” to deposit; nothing compelled compliance, and voluntary uptake proved insufficient to achieve the policy’s public-access goal.
• 2008 — mandatory by law. Congress made deposit mandatory through Division G, Title II, Section 218 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (Public Law 110-161), enacted December 26, 2007. NIH implemented the statutory mandate via Notice NOT-OD-08-033 (issued January 11, 2008), with the deposit requirement taking effect April 7, 2008, for any peer-reviewed manuscript arising from NIH funds and accepted for publication from that date forward. This is the “2008 NIH Public Access Policy” that governed for the next 17 years, with a standard 12-month embargo before public availability.
• 2024/2025 — zero embargo. NIH released the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy on December 17, 2024, removing the 12-month embargo entirely. It was originally scheduled to take effect December 31, 2025, but NIH accelerated the effective date to July 1, 2025 via Notice NOT-OD-25-101. Since that date, covered manuscripts must be publicly available in PMC immediately upon the article’s official publication date.

“Public access” vs. “open access” — getting the name right

Searchers and even some university guidance pages use “NIH open access policy” loosely, but that is not the policy’s official name, and the distinction is not just cosmetic. NIH’s own materials consistently call it the Public Access Policy. “Open access” more commonly refers to a publishing/licensing model (e.g., journals or articles published under a Creative Commons license with no access restriction from day one, sometimes for a fee — see gold open access). The NIH Public Access Policy is narrower and mechanical: it is a funder deposit mandate that guarantees free public availability of a specific manuscript version through a specific government repository (PMC), on a specific timeline, regardless of whether the journal itself is open access, subscription-based, or hybrid. A manuscript published in a subscription journal that has never adopted open-access licensing can still fully satisfy the NIH Public Access Policy, because the policy governs deposit and embargo, not the journal’s own licensing terms. This makes it a form of green open access (self-archiving in a repository) rather than gold, and a specific instance of the broader category of a funder open access mandate — NIH’s is simply the largest and most consequential single-funder example of that category in U.S. biomedical research.

How this differs from the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy

The NIH Public Access Policy is frequently, and incorrectly, conflated with NIH’s 2023 Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy, effective January 25, 2023. They are separate policies covering different research outputs:

• The Public Access Policy governs peer-reviewed manuscripts — it requires deposit of the Author Accepted Manuscript in PubMed Central after journal acceptance.
• The DMS Policy governs scientific data — it requires a Data Management and Sharing Plan for essentially all NIH-funded research that generates scientific data, submitted at the application stage, addressing how data will be managed and, where appropriate, shared and preserved.

A grant can trigger both obligations independently: a study’s underlying dataset is subject to the DMS Policy regardless of whether or how the resulting article is published, and the resulting manuscript is separately subject to the Public Access Policy regardless of the study’s data-sharing plan. Depositing a dataset in a public repository does not satisfy the Public Access Policy’s manuscript-deposit requirement, and depositing a manuscript in PMC does not satisfy the DMS Policy’s data-management obligations. See CASRAI’s comparison of NIH and NSF data management plan requirements for how the DMS Policy compares across funders; that guide addresses data management specifically, not public access.

The OSTP Nelson Memo and the shift to zero embargo

NIH’s move to zero embargo was not an isolated NIH decision. On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a policy memorandum, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” widely referred to as the Nelson Memo after Alondra Nelson, who was serving as OSTP’s Acting Director at the time. The memo directed all federal agencies with research and development expenditures to update their public access policies to eliminate the optional 12-month embargo previously permitted under the 2013 OSTP memorandum, requiring free, immediate public access to peer-reviewed federally funded publications, with agency-level policies to take effect no later than the end of 2025. NIH’s 2024 Public Access Policy is its agency-specific implementation of that government-wide directive; NIH is not unique in moving to zero embargo, and comparable revisions are underway at other federal science agencies covered by the Nelson Memo.

Compliance in practice

NIH tracks and enforces compliance primarily through the grants process rather than through the manuscript itself: institutions and investigators use the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system to deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript, PMC assigns a PMCID once deposit and any required processing is complete, and that PMCID must then be cited whenever the publication is referenced in a later NIH application, progress report, or RPPR. NIH can delay processing of a non-compliant application or award pending resolution of outstanding public-access requirements. Because the applicable embargo rule depends on the article’s acceptance date rather than its award or submission date, research offices tracking compliance across a mixed portfolio of pre- and post-July 2025 publications need to check each manuscript’s acceptance date individually rather than applying one rule institution-wide.

Related terms

See also Author accepted manuscript, Embargo, Postprint, Preprint, Green open access, Open access mandate, and Data Management Plan (DMP). For the broader research data management context, see CASRAI’s Research Data Management pillar.