Since 2008, the NIH Public Access Policy mandates that peer-reviewed articles resulting from NIH funding must be freely available in PubMed Central (PMC) within 12 months of publication. Changes to the NIH Public Access Policy have been brewing for the last couple years after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued their memo “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” You can read more about the OSTP memo through the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
In response to the OSTP memo, the NIH released their new 2024 NIH Public Access Policy that will apply to articles accepted for publication on or after December 31, 2025. Perhaps the biggest takeaway of the new policy is that it removes the current 12-month embargo period, requiring authors to make their NIH-funded articles available in PMC as soon as their work is published.