CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: research funding

  • NIH Public Access Policy 2025: No-Embargo Free Access

    The US National Institutes of Health updated its Public Access Policy so that peer-reviewed manuscripts arising from NIH-supported research are made freely available in PubMed Central (PMC) immediately on the official date of publication, with no embargo period. The revised policy took effect in 2025 and replaced a long-standing arrangement under which deposited manuscripts could remain behind an access delay of up to twelve months. This article describes what changed and what it means in practice; it is a neutral explainer and not legal or compliance advice.

    What the policy actually requires

    Under the updated policy, authors of papers that result from NIH funding must ensure that the accepted, peer-reviewed manuscript is deposited in PubMed Central and made publicly accessible without an embargo. The central change is timing: where the earlier 2008-era policy allowed the freely available version to appear up to a year after publication, the version now in force removes that delay so the manuscript is available to readers at the point of publication.

    The requirement attaches to the funding rather than to the journal. A paper that acknowledges NIH support, or that reports work conducted under an NIH award, falls within scope regardless of where it is published. The policy concerns the author-accepted manuscript — the peer-reviewed text after revisions but typically before the publisher’s final typeset formatting — which is what is deposited and surfaced through PMC.

    Why NIH made the change

    The update aligns NIH practice with the wider US federal direction on access to publicly funded research. Federal science-policy guidance has pushed agencies toward making the results of taxpayer-funded research freely and immediately available, and the removal of the optional embargo brings the largest US biomedical funder into line with that direction. For readers tracing the policy lineage, the broader federal context is set out in our explainer on the OSTP Nelson memo.

    NIH has framed the change as advancing public access to the literature it funds and improving the speed at which findings reach clinicians, researchers and the public. The agency administers the deposit workflow through established systems rather than through any new submission portal, so the operational mechanics for authors are largely familiar.

    What changes for authors and administrators

    For investigators, the practical shift is that they can no longer rely on a publisher embargo to delay free availability. Manuscript deposit must be arranged so that the public version appears on publication. Many authors handle this through the journal’s deposit service where one exists, or by submitting the accepted manuscript themselves through the NIH Manuscript Submission system.

    • Scope check: determine whether a paper acknowledges NIH funding — that is the trigger for the policy.
    • Version control: identify the peer-reviewed accepted manuscript, which is the version deposited.
    • Timing: ensure the deposit and public-release settings reflect immediate availability rather than a delayed release.
    • Identifiers: a PMC identifier (PMCID) continues to be used to demonstrate compliance, including in progress reports and future applications.

    Research administrators frequently track compliance because a PMCID is referenced when citing prior NIH-funded work in applications and reports. Removing the embargo does not change that reporting relationship; it changes the moment at which the deposited version becomes publicly readable.

    How it interacts with publishing choices

    The policy does not require authors to publish in any particular journal or to pay an article-processing charge. Depositing the accepted manuscript in PubMed Central is a route to compliance that is independent of whether the journal itself is open access. Authors may still publish in subscription journals provided the accepted manuscript is made freely available through PMC on the publication date. For background on the underlying concept, see our plain-language note on open access in the standards dictionary.

    Because the deposited version is the author-accepted manuscript rather than the publisher’s final formatted article, the freely available copy may differ cosmetically from the version of record. The scholarly content is the peer-reviewed text; pagination, branding and final typesetting may vary.

    Rights and licensing considerations

    A frequent question concerns the rights under which the deposited manuscript is made available. Depositing the accepted manuscript in PubMed Central is a matter of public accessibility — readers can find and read it — and authors continue to navigate publication agreements with their chosen journals. Some authors retain rights to deposit the accepted manuscript through the terms of their publishing agreement, while institutions and funders increasingly encourage authors to secure such rights up front. The policy’s focus is on free public availability through PMC; the precise licensing of any individual deposit depends on the agreement between author and publisher.

    This distinction matters for reuse. Free to read is not always the same as free to reuse under an open licence. Authors who want their work to be reusable under a specific licence typically address that through their publication choices, while the funder requirement guarantees, at minimum, immediate free access for readers via PubMed Central.

    What to watch next

    Implementation detail continues to be clarified through NIH guidance, including how deposit workflows operate for different journal arrangements and how the policy is reflected in award terms. Institutions generally update internal guidance and library support services to reflect the no-embargo expectation. Many libraries offer author support to help investigators identify the correct manuscript version, complete deposits and obtain the PMCID that documents compliance. Readers seeking the authoritative text should consult NIH’s own published policy pages rather than secondary summaries, since operational specifics can be refined over time.

    The headline is straightforward: NIH-funded peer-reviewed papers are now free to read in PubMed Central from the day they are published, without the previous waiting period. For the systems and terminology behind US research funding more broadly, our CRediT contributor-role overview and funding explainers provide neutral, definitional context.

  • Funding acknowledgements and grant identifiers: closing the loop on research funding

    Almost every research paper carries a sentence of thanks to its funders — “this work was supported by” followed by an agency name and, if you are lucky, a grant number. It takes seconds to write and, in its usual free-text form, it is almost useless as data. A funder trying to answer the simple question “what did our money produce?” finds the answer scattered across thousands of inconsistently worded acknowledgements that no system can reliably aggregate. Closing that loop — connecting the grant that paid for the work to the outputs the work produced — is the problem this article is about, and it belongs to the funding-and-finance domain. For authors, the practical starting point is the guidance on acknowledging funders.

    The free-text problem

    The same funder is written a hundred ways across a corpus: full legal name on one paper, an acronym on the next, a translated form, a former name, a sub-programme mistaken for the parent body, a typo in the grant number. To a human reader the meaning is obvious; to a system trying to count outputs per funder or per grant, every variant is a different string that fails to match. The consequences are concrete. Funders cannot easily demonstrate return on investment, evaluate which schemes produced the most influential work, or check that the open-access and reporting conditions attached to a grant were met. Institutions cannot reconcile what was acknowledged against what was awarded. The information exists on the page; it simply is not in a form anyone can compute with.

    The Open Funder Registry: identifying the funder

    The first half of the fix is to give every funder a single, stable identifier. The Open Funder Registry (originally FundRef, now maintained as part of Crossref’s infrastructure) is an open, curated list of funding bodies, each with a unique funder ID and a controlled record of its name variants, acronyms, and hierarchical relationships to parent and child organisations. When a publisher records a funder ID against an acknowledgement rather than only a free-text name, every variant of “National Institute” collapses onto one entity. The registry does for funders what other registries do for institutions: it replaces a messy display string with a resolvable identifier that carries the meaning.

    The registry also cross-walks to organisation identifiers — many funders are also research organisations, and the alignment between funder IDs and the Research Organization Registry (ROR) lets a body be recognised consistently whether it is being named as a funder or as an affiliation. That cross-walk matters because it stops the funder-data silo and the organisation-data silo from telling different stories about the same institution.

    Crossref grant linking: identifying the grant

    Naming the funder is only half the loop. The more valuable connection is to the specific grant, and that is what Crossref grant linking provides. Crossref operates a grant-registration system in which funders register their awards and receive a grant identifier — a DOI for the grant itself. The grant record carries structured metadata: the funder, the award number, the title, the investigators (ideally with their ORCID iDs), the funded institutions (ideally with ROR IDs), and the award amount and period.

    Once a grant has its own persistent identifier, an output can cite it the way it cites anything else. A published article’s metadata can carry the grant DOI, creating a machine-readable link from the paper back to the award that paid for it. That single link is what closes the loop: instead of inferring the connection from a fragile name-and-number string, a system can follow an identifier from grant to output and back. Funders can then assemble, automatically, the full set of outputs associated with an award — papers, datasets, software, preprints — rather than reconstructing it by hand from acknowledgements.

    How the pieces fit with the wider identifier stack

    Grant linking is most powerful in combination with the other persistent identifiers, because each answers a different question about a funded piece of work:

    • The funder ID answers who paid — the funding body.
    • The grant ID answers under which award — the specific grant.
    • ORCID answers who did the work — the funded researchers.
    • ROR answers where — the institutions that held the award.
    • The output’s DOI answers what was produced.

    Linked together, these turn a pile of disconnected records into a navigable funding graph: this funder, through this grant, supported these researchers at these institutions to produce these outputs. The graph is what makes funder reporting tractable, and its absence is exactly why “outputs by grant” has historically been so painful to compute.

    What authors and institutions can do

    1. Record the funder ID and the grant identifier, not just the name. When a submission system offers to attach a registered funder from the Open Funder Registry, or to record a grant DOI, accept it — that is the step that makes the acknowledgement countable.
    2. Quote the award number exactly as the funder issued it, so that even where a grant DOI is not yet available, the number can be matched reliably.
    3. Attach ORCID iDs and ROR IDs to investigators and institutions in grant and output metadata, so the funding graph connects cleanly at every node.
    4. Treat the acknowledgement as structured data, not prose. A sentence of thanks is a courtesy; the identifiers behind it are what let a funder see what its money produced.

    Crediting the people the funding supported

    Funding metadata records what paid for the work; it does not record who did it. The CRediT taxonomy includes a dedicated Funding acquisition role — the work of securing the financial support that made the project possible — which lets the often-invisible labour of winning a grant be recorded on the resulting paper alongside the other contributions. Grant identifiers connect the award to the output; CRediT connects the people to the work the award funded. Together they ensure that both the money and the human contribution are visible in the record.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    “Funder”, “grant”, “award”, “acknowledgement”, and “funding statement” are used inconsistently across publishers, funders, and institutions, which is part of why funding data is so hard to reconcile. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these terms precisely — and points back to the Open Funder Registry and Crossref’s grant-linking schema — is what lets a funding acknowledgement written in one system be understood in another. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the funding-and-finance domain.

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