The second step in complying with the NIH Public Access Policy is addressing copyright. This is an important step to the process because it allows your manuscript to be deposited into PubMed Central.

You need to make sure that the publisher's Copyright Transfer Agreement that you sign allows for submitting your final, peer-reviewed manuscript to the NIH Manuscript Submission Tool upon acceptance for publication as well as making it publicly available via PubMed Central within 12 months of official publication.

One way to do this is by inserting the text given below into the agreement. This wording is provided by NIH.

“Journal acknowledges that Author retains the right to provide a copy of the final peer-reviewed manuscript to the NIH upon acceptance for Journal publication, for public archiving in PubMed Central as soon as possible but no later than 12 months after publication by Journal."

Another way to do this is by generating a Science Commons author addendum using the form below and submitting it along with the Copyright Transfer Agreement (click here for instructions). The Science Commons addendum complies with the NIH Public Access Policy by allowing the author to retain their copyright and archiving their work in an online repository (such as PubMed Central).