NIH Issues New Public Access Policy, Seeks Input on Proposed Metadata Plan

By: Yvette Seger
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
On December 17, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its new Public Access Policy, the goal of which is to accelerate access to scholarly publications resulting from research funded by the agency. The updated policy builds upon the current NIH Public Access Policy – issued in 2008 – and fulfills the goals of the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum, Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research. The most significant update to the policy is the removal of the 12-month embargo period prior to making manuscripts freely available to the public. The updated policy will apply to manuscripts accepted for publication on or after December 31, 2025, and was accompanied by the release of supplemental guidance on government use license and rights and publication costs.

In conjunction with the release of the 2024 Public Access Policy, NIH issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking input on the agency’s proposed plan to increase findability and transparency of research results through the use of metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs). Aimed at fulfilling the research integrity objective in the 2022 OSTP memorandum, the NIH plan outlines how researchers and institutions should use metadata and PIDs to make the outputs of their work more transparent and findable. It also proposes minimum metadata to be collected by NIH-supported scientific data repositories. Comments on this proposed plan must be submitted via an online form and will be accepted through February 21.