The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced that its hitherto voluntary Public Access Policy will become mandatory. This means that a final, electronic version of manuscripts describing research that received direct support from the NIH must be submitted to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central site. The new policy affects all NIH-funded manuscripts that are accepted for publication after April 7, 2008.
As a service to our authors, The Journal of Neuroscience will deposit in PubMed Central the final versions of manuscripts that need to comply with this policy. Although the NIH policy calls for manuscripts in PubMed Central to be freely accessible after 12 months, The Journal will allow manuscripts to be publicly accessible through PubMed Central 6 months after publication, which is when all Journal of Neuroscience articles become freely accessible. Manuscripts describing work that was funded by the NIH, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Wellcome Trust and that are accepted for publication in The Journal of Neuroscience on or after April 7, 2008 will be deposited.
This service will be provided automatically, without a fee, and should fulfill the obligations that grantees of these agencies have in complying with the NIH Public Access Policy for articles published in The Journal of Neuroscience.