Abstract

In November 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would begin enforcing its April 2008 mandate of public access to NIH-funded research by delaying processing of investigators’ grants reporting noncompliant publications. In response, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries offered to assist the University’s sponsored research administration in supporting NCSU researchers who had publications stemming from NIH funding and had not achieved compliance. Since the 2008 NIH mandate, over 1,000 articles based on NIH-funding have been published by NCSU across research areas including veterinary medicine, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, engineering, textiles, design, math, and statistics. Many were published in journals which did not automatically deposit papers to meet NIH requirements. Although familiar with biomedical literature, author agreements, and open access, we did not fully grasp the complex web of investigator, author, publisher, institution, and funder relations involved in this mandate until we were deeply engaged in the process and gained access to the compliance monitoring data.

In this paper, we discuss the costs and benefits of library support for authors needing to attain compliance with an eye toward how this support may be scaled up if other federal funding agencies follow suit. We share practical strategies for supporting compliance efforts for individual researchers and at the campuswide level, as well as training newly funded researchers to facilitate future compliance. We discuss the advantages of leveraging existing relationships with publishers to help their researchers, strategies for getting involved in compliance support, and insights on how to skill-up and scale-up when engaging in this part of the research process.

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Support When It Counts: Library Roles in Public Access to Federally Funded Research

In November 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would begin enforcing its April 2008 mandate of public access to NIH-funded research by delaying processing of investigators’ grants reporting noncompliant publications. In response, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries offered to assist the University’s sponsored research administration in supporting NCSU researchers who had publications stemming from NIH funding and had not achieved compliance. Since the 2008 NIH mandate, over 1,000 articles based on NIH-funding have been published by NCSU across research areas including veterinary medicine, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, engineering, textiles, design, math, and statistics. Many were published in journals which did not automatically deposit papers to meet NIH requirements. Although familiar with biomedical literature, author agreements, and open access, we did not fully grasp the complex web of investigator, author, publisher, institution, and funder relations involved in this mandate until we were deeply engaged in the process and gained access to the compliance monitoring data.

In this paper, we discuss the costs and benefits of library support for authors needing to attain compliance with an eye toward how this support may be scaled up if other federal funding agencies follow suit. We share practical strategies for supporting compliance efforts for individual researchers and at the campuswide level, as well as training newly funded researchers to facilitate future compliance. We discuss the advantages of leveraging existing relationships with publishers to help their researchers, strategies for getting involved in compliance support, and insights on how to skill-up and scale-up when engaging in this part of the research process.