Open Access

A growing number of funding agencies now stipulate that research articles they have funded must be deposited in public repositories.

Oxford Journals helps authors comply with these deposition requirements through our open access initiative Oxford Open. All journals in Oxford Open will have their open access papers automatically deposited and made publicly available in PMC by Oxford Journals.*

Self-archiving

All Oxford journals have specific self-archiving policies and licence forms which lay out in detail the provisions made for deposition in repositories. Broadly, most Oxford journals have 12 or 24 month embargos on self-archiving (see individual journal policy for detail). As such, authors with 12 month mandates, such as those funded by the NIH can comply simply by publishing in a 12 month embargo journal. Any author whose funder mandates deposition in under 12 months will need to publish their paper under an open access licence to meet their funder or funders' requirements.

Funding agencies with deposition requirements include:

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

• NIH Public Access Policy
The NIH Public Access policy ‘requires investigators funded by the NIH to submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.’

• NIH and Oxford Journals
Any NIH-funded manuscripts submitted to Oxford Journals which are clearly identified by the authors as being funded by the NIH will be tagged, and the final published version will then be sent to PMC for them to include on their platform. Authors do not need to deposit articles themselves via the NIH Manuscript Sumbission system.

This means that authors funded by the NIH can comply simply by publishing in a 12 month embargo journal.

NIH-funded articles which are open access will be available immediately, and those which are not open access will be available after 12 months. To clarify, in both cases, the final published version of the NIH-funded article will be hosted at PMC. Oxford Journals will work with our authors to identify which articles are funded by the NIH.

Please note that PMC considers publication date to mean issue publication date. As such, Oxford Journals sends NIH-funded articles to PMC at issue stage, and they will become available in PMC 12 months after that date. Authors should note that PMC will only issue PMCIDs once the article has been published in an issue. Prior to this NIH-funded authors should cite their articles as 'epub ahead of press' in any progress reports to the NIH.

Once articles have been published in an issue, authors can find their PMCIDs at PMC by following these instructions.

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UKPMC Funders Group (including the Wellcome Trust)

• The UKPMC funders group comprises 18 funding bodies (including the Wellcome Trust, UK Medical Research Council, the Dapertment of Health and Cancer Research UK). In addition there are four associate funding bodies (Health Research Board Ireland, Telethon Italy, Austrian Sciences Research Fund, and Science Foundation Ireland).

• UKPMC Funders Group (including the Wellcome Trust) Public Access Policy
The Wellcome Trust 'requires electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by Wellcome Trust funding, to be made freely accessible from the PMC database (and any other PMC International (PMCI) sites, such as UKPMC) as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of the journal publisher's official date of final publication.’ Similarly, the other organizations in the group generally require authors to deposit any research papers funded by them into UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) within six months.

• UKPMC Funders (including the Wellcome Trust) and Oxford Journals
As most Oxford Journals embargos are generally either 12 or 24 months, the only means for authors to comply with this policy is through open access publication via our Oxford Open initiative.** Please also note that as self-archiving policies vary from journal to journal authors will need to refer to the self-archiving policy of the relevant journal.

Oxford Journals deposit all open access articles into PMC upon publication and all content on UKPMC mirrors that of PMC. This means that, by publishing their article as open access, authors will automatically comply with their funding mandate and they do not need to deposit the article themselves.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

• HHMI Public Access Policy
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) stipulates that if an article is published in a journal in the biological or biomedical sciences, it must be made available through PMC within six months of publication.

• HHMI and Oxford Journals As most Oxford Journals embargos are generally either 12 or 24 months, the only means for authors to comply with this policy is through open access publication via our Oxford Open initiative.** Please also note that as self-archiving policies vary from journal to journal authors will need to refer to the self-archiving policy of the relevant journal.

Oxford Journals deposit all open access articles into PMC upon publication.* By publishing their article as open access, authors will automatically comply with their HHMI funding mandate and they do not need to deposit the article themselves.

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*Where subject relevant

** The exception to this rule is the Japanese Journal of Clinical Oncology which has a six month embargo.