PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights

Authors and publishers have long negotiated the ownership of copyright in scholarly works. However, with the rise of electronic publishing and a growing trend towards open and public access models, traditional authorpublisher agreements are changing. One of many forces bringing about this change is the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) recently revised Public Access Policy, requiring authors of NIH-funded articles to submit their works to PubMed Central. As a result of this policy, authors of funded works are looking closely at their publication agreements and scientific, technical, and medical journal publishers are re-examining their author agreements to accommodate the author’s needs. This paper, in an effort to help authors make informed choices about their rights, compares and contrasts how the agreements of 12 publishers permit authors to meet the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy and share their works while they are under embargo