Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press (OUP), UK, has announced that they will deposit into PubMed Central (PMC) any articles published in any of their biomedical journals which are identified by the authors as being funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This development helps authors to comply with the public access policies of the NIH.
The NIH policy (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/) requires investigators funded by the NIH to submit to PMC an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscript upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Any NIH-funded manuscripts submitted to Oxford Journals from 31st July 2008 onwards will be identified and tagged, and the final published version will then be sent to PMC for them to include on their platform.
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, rather than the original manuscript. Data feeds between PMC and the journals concerned have already been set up, and now Oxford Journals will work with our authors to identify which articles are funded by the NIH.
Oxford Journals has also prepared some information and guidelines for authors of various funding agencies. The guidelines are available online at http://www.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/repositories.html.
