NIH Public Access Policy

Create a My NCBI Account

Set Up Delegates (optional)

Add Your Citations to My Bibliography and check compliance.

NOTE: Anyone submitting an application, proposal or report to the NIH must include the PMC reference number (PMCID) when citing applicable papers that they author or that arise from their NIH-funded research.

For articles not in PubMed Central you will need to check the NIH Manuscript Submission System for a number.

All NIH researchers must create a My NCBI account and link to to their NIH eRA Commons account. Start at the upper right of the PubMed.gov page.

Then sign in  via NIH Login.

If you already have a My NCBI account and it is not linked to your eRA account, you need to sign in, click on your account name, and change your NCBI Account settings so you are linked to 'NIH & eRA Commons'.

If you would like a delegate to help with compliance, you can add them in My Bibliography after making your bibliography Public.

Click on Edit settings in My Bibliography,

then change to Public and add delegates.

Complete instructions can be found in the My Bibliography section of the My NCBI Help book at NCBI.

Add  your papers to My Bibliography in My NCBI by running an author search in PubMed or manually adding books, chapters, patents, etc.

Once everything is in My Bibliography you will need to:

Check the Compliance Status of your publications.

If you do not see a green dot under the citation in Awards view, you need to update information.

Initiate Public Access Compliance

Indicate which articles are NIH funded and indicate where compliance is not applicable.

Associate Funding to your Publications

Assign awards to citations.