National Institutes of Health (NIH)

If you are funded by the NIH…

... you will be required to deposit the final manuscript of your journal article in PubMed Central (PMC) , and ensure it is freely available within 12 months of publication. Springer journals are perfectly ready to meet this requirement for open access articles, and permit authors of subscription articles to self-archive the accepted manuscript. Additional information on Springer’s self-archiving policy 

If you choose to publish your article as open access within the Springer Open Choice program, Springer deposits the final published version of your article into PubMed Central and it is made publicly accessible. The copyright will remain with you and the article will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. 

If you choose to publish your article with the traditional subscription-based model (without open access), you can self-archive the accepted manuscript of your article into the NIH Manuscript Submission System, from where it will be sent to PubMed Central and made publicly available 12 months after publication.

If you are employed by the NIH…

... you cannot transfer your copyright to the publisher. Our publishing workflow is perfectly ready to meet this need and will allow you to fully comply.

NIH intramural authors also need to submit the accepted article manuscript to the NIHMS via http://www.nihms.nih.gov/ themselves, so that it is available on PMC 12 months after official publication. Please visit Springer’s self-archiving policy for further details. So NIH employees/NIH intramural authors should not indicate that they are NIH funded (I am NIH funded – ‘No’) as you need to submit the accepted manuscript version of the article yourself to PubMed Central.

Additional information on Springer’s self-archiving policy 

To learn more about our SpringerOpen, our fully open access journal and book portfolio, please click here.