NIH and Plan S Open Access Mandates: How to Comply

NIH and cOAlition S funders both expect funded papers to be free to read on publication, but they differ on licence, repository and fees. Timing is where compliance usually slips.

Guide · 11 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

Who paid decides, not where you publish

An open access mandate is a condition of a grant. It applies because of who paid for the work, not because of where you publish.

That has two consequences people miss. First, a paper can be covered even when the funded investigator is not an author: the NIH policy applies regardless of whether the NIH-funded principal investigator is an author, and regardless of whether non-NIH funds also contributed. Second, one paper can sit under several mandates at once, one for each funder in the acknowledgements.

So the first job is an inventory: for every paper, each grant that supported the work, who awarded it, and which open access policy that funder applies. When more than one policy applies, you have to satisfy all of them, which in practice means meeting the strictest requirement on each point: timing, licence, repository and fees.

What the NIH Public Access Policy requires

The 2024 NIH Public Access Policy replaced the 2008 policy, which had allowed an embargo of up to 12 months. It applies to manuscripts accepted on or after 1 July 2025. It covers work funded in whole or in part through grants and cooperative agreements (including training grants), contracts, Other Transactions, and NIH intramural research. It has no end date, so papers published after an award closes still count. One exception: papers from awards that closed before 1 July 2025 stay under the 2008 policy and its 12-month embargo.

The requirements below come from the policy and from PMC's public access guidance.

Two details catch people out. The Official Date of Publication is the date the final, edited article first appears in print or online, so an online-first release sets it, not the later issue. And the acknowledgement matters: NIH states that leaving out the required funding acknowledgement may itself make the paper noncompliant.

There are two ways to meet the deposit requirement. Either the accepted manuscript goes into PMC through NIHMS, or the journal deposits the final published article under a formal agreement with the National Library of Medicine. For the second route, check the journal's PMC Journal List record for a release delay of 0 months and an active agreement. If it deposits with an embargo, have the embargo lifted on your article or deposit the accepted manuscript yourself.

If you are not sure which file counts as your accepted manuscript, our explainer on article versions sets out the differences.

What Plan S requires

Plan S is not one policy. It is a set of principles adopted by cOAlition S, a group of research funders, and each member writes those principles into its own grant conditions on its own timeline. The core requirement is that peer-reviewed articles from research they fund are openly available immediately on publication, with no embargo.

The Plan S implementation guidance describes three routes.

Do not rule the third route out on the date alone. cOAlition S added that "exceptionally, individual cOAlition S funders may still choose to financially participate in Transformative Agreements beyond 2024 as part of their respective national strategies." UKRI is one: its block grant still covers "hybrid journals that are part of an approved transitional open access agreement", with phase-out expected in 2028 to 2029.

Whichever route you use, the default licence is CC BY. The guidance accepts CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC0 as secondary alternatives, and a funder may approve CC BY-ND for an individual article if you explicitly request and justify it. Third-party material in the article, such as reproduced images, is not affected.

Individual funders decide how they apply the principles, including which fees they pay, so read your own funder's policy rather than a general summary. The cOAlition S strategy for 2026 to 2030 also includes reviewing the principles and implementation guidance, so check the current text when you start a new project.

Rights retention: settle it before you submit

The repository route has a weak point. A subscription journal may ask you to sign an agreement that limits how you share the accepted manuscript, sometimes with an embargo. If you sign that first, you may no longer hold the rights to post the manuscript immediately under CC BY.

The cOAlition S rights retention strategy is designed to close that gap. Participating funders change their grant conditions so that a CC BY licence applies to accepted manuscripts from the grant, either from the start of the grant or as an obligation the grantee must meet. Authors then state this in the submission. The example wording cOAlition S publishes, taken from Wellcome's grant conditions, is:

cOAlition S takes the position that this earlier licence or obligation takes legal precedence over a later licence to publish or copyright transfer agreement. Do not treat that as a reason to skip the paperwork: use your funder's exact wording, and put it in the funding statement of the submitted manuscript, where it stays with the file the publisher keeps. If your funder also asks for it in the cover letter, as UKRI does, include it there too.

NIH works differently. It does not require a particular licence, because its right to post the accepted manuscript comes from the Government Use License that recipients grant when they accept NIH funding. NIH still encourages authors to tell journals the manuscript is subject to the policy, and it offers this sample text for the submitted manuscript:

A seven-step compliance workflow

1. Identify every funder behind the paper. Build the inventory described above at submission at the latest, while there is still time to act on what it shows.
2. Check the journal's route before you submit. Run it through the Journal Checker Tool for Plan S funders and the PMC Journal List for NIH, and confirm it offers a licence every funder accepts.
3. Add funding and rights statements to the manuscript. Grant numbers in the funding statement, your funder's rights retention wording, and NIH's sample text if you want it.
4. Read the publishing agreement before you sign. Resolve any embargo or conflicting licence term with the journal or your research office first.
5. Deposit the accepted manuscript at acceptance. Start the deposit that week. PMC notes manuscript processing can take up to four weeks at busy times, and that anyone can start a submission but only an author can complete the approval steps. Europe PMC funders use Europe PMC Plus instead. Where both apply, PMC says to deposit once, through the system linked to the funder with the stricter requirements.
6. Confirm the deposit and the release. At publication, check the deposit is complete, released without embargo, and carries the required licence. If the journal was meant to deposit, check that it did.
7. Record the identifier in reports. Cite the PMCID in NIH applications and progress reports, and keep repository links for other funders.

Reporting, and what noncompliance costs

The NIH Grants Policy Statement requires applications, proposals and progress reports that cite covered papers authored by the applicant to include the PMCID or NIHMSID. The NIHMSID is only a stopgap: PMC states it is valid for compliance reporting for 90 days after the publication date, after which you need the PMCID.

The most practical tracking tool is My Bibliography in My NCBI. Linked to an eRA Commons account, it marks each publication as complete, in process, non-compliant or not defined, and lets you start an NIHMS deposit or link a paper to an award. Check it before every progress report, not after.

For NIH grants, compliance is the institution's responsibility. Non-competing continuation awards are subject to delays in award processing for noncompliance, and NIH may consider it in future funding decisions for the institution. Under Plan S, each funder sets its own sanctions; the implementation guidance gives examples, from withholding grant funds to excluding non-compliant grant holders from future calls.

If you find a gap, do not wait for a report to expose it. Start the deposit, add the identifier to the next report, and tell your research office what happened.

Paying fees without breaking cost rules

Neither mandate requires you to pay a journal. NIH says compliance is free, and the Plan S repository route with rights retention carries no fee. If you do choose a paid route, NIH's publication cost guidance allows reasonable costs as direct or indirect costs, but lists these as unallowable:

• Fees charged solely for submitting the accepted manuscript to PMC
• Charges for services with no publicly available product, such as peer review alone
• Costs your institution already covers through a publisher agreement, which would be double charging
• Higher charges levied because the paper is NIH-funded or subject to the policy
• Costs incurred after the award is closed out; charges are still allowed during the 120-day liquidation period for originally approved activities

These rules may change. NIH's 2025 request for information on capping publication costs has not produced a final policy. Separately, a May 2026 OMB proposed rule would make publication costs, including APCs, generally unallowable on all federal awards unless required by statute or approved in advance. A continuing resolution bars it from being finalised through 11 December 2026. Check the current Grants Policy Statement, NIH Guide notices and the status of the Uniform Guidance revision before you budget.

For Plan S, the principles say that where fees apply they should be covered by funders or institutions, not individual researchers. They also say funders do not support the hybrid model except, transitionally, as part of transformative arrangements, which is why some still pay under approved agreements. Beyond that, what each funder pays varies. For waiver requests and the funding language to put in writing, see our guide to APC waivers and fair access.

For research offices: make compliance the default

A common cause of noncompliance is not a refusal. It is a deposit nobody started because nobody owned it. A short set of standing arrangements closes that gap:

1. A register of active awards showing each funder's open access policy and licence requirement
2. Rights retention and NIH statements built into manuscript templates
3. An acceptance trigger, with a named person who starts NIHMS or repository deposits
4. A record of which publisher agreements already cover fees, so the same article is not also charged to a grant
5. A My Bibliography check scheduled before progress reports fall due
6. One person responsible for watching NIH and cOAlition S policy updates

For researchers who assume open access means paying or lower quality, see our piece on open access myths.

Where to check before you submit

Submission and acceptance are the unforgiving moments. Sign a publishing agreement that conflicts with your grant conditions and you may lose the rights the repository route depends on; let acceptance pass without starting the deposit and the paper is late on publication day.

Whichever journal you choose, compare its licence and deposit terms against every funder's policy before you submit. Directive Publications gathers its open access, licensing and copyright policies on its For Authors page, so you can make that check first, and you can contact the editorial office with questions about a specific manuscript.