The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on Enhancing Public Access: tracking institutional contribution rates.

Abstract

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) enacted its Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research on May 2, 2005 [1, 2]. The policy requests that authors of peer-reviewed publications resulting from NIH-funded research voluntarily submit a copy of their final manuscript to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for archiving in PubMed Central (PMC), the NLM's open access electronic repository for life sciences journals. Because compliance with the policy is voluntary, its success depends on investigators' awareness of the policy and their willingness to contribute their work to PMC. Librarians wishing to promote the NIH policy need a tool to help determine an institution's contribution rate to PMC so they can direct local awareness training and library support for the policy. This paper presents an adaptable institutional contribution rate (ICR) formula using NLM's PubMed database.