National Institutes of Health public access policy and the University of Michigan Libraries' role in assisting with depositing to PubMed Central

Faculty experiences with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy, compliance issues, and copyright practices

“…Specitically, faculfy NIH grant awardees noted that the time involved in deciphering confusing insfructions, efforf expended on contacting journal editors, and unclear journal policies were challenges reported in complying with the federal mandate. Librarians are well positioned to help faculty unravel the complexities of undersfanding the NIH policy and compliance issues by offering services such as investigating journal policies and journal compliance with the NIH public access policy, reviewing copyright transfer agreements, contacting journal editors and publishers as needed, and providing access to important copyright resources such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) author addendum or Scholars Copyright Addendtmi Engine [16,17]. Libraries can also help bridge mandate compliance by establishing services to directly deposit manuscripts to PubMed Central on behalf of researchers [18,19].…”

The Growing Crisis: Scholarly Publishing Pressures Facing Health Sciences Libraries

“…Libraries put up Web pages to help clarify the manuscript submission process, developed NIH Policy addenda for journal publication agreements, did outreach about the policy to faculty, and held information sessions (Lapinski, Osterbur, Parker, & McCray, 2012;Rosenzweig, Schnitzer, Song, Martin, & Ottaviani, 2011;Stimson, 2009). Busy faculty welcomed this assistance with what can be a confusing process of determining when they need to act vs. when publishers will deposit for them, and working through the steps in the NIH Manuscript Submission system (NIHMS).…”

“…Some libraries have also offered a service of depositing manuscripts on behalf of authors. These libraries obtained a publisher account in order to deposit manuscripts from multiple researchers in NIHMS (Lapinski et al, 2012;Rosenzweig et al, 2011).…”

How to earn a reputation as a great partner

“…A “newness” factor—the implementation of a new system, a new regulation or requirement (e.g., Rosenzweig et al [ 4 ]), a new funding opportunity (e.g., Williams and Rambo [ 5 ]), or a recently arrived, promoted, or assigned person—provides a ready-made rationale for reaching out to potential partners. If you devote a little thought to it, you can usually identify a substantive newness factor as a plausible reason for contacting any potential partner, whether internal or external.…”