Open Access and Scholarly Communications: Depositing Your Work

The Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) provides long-term access and safekeeping for scholarly works, datasets, research materials, records, and audiovisual materials produced by the UNC-Chapel Hill community.  The CDR currently supports:

• Relationships with other repositories.  UNC has built a relationship with BioMed Central to automatically ingest content authored by UNC researchers who only have to deposit their works once.
• Embargo. The CDR supports the attachment of an embargo with any future date to a work. Visitors can see that the document exists but cannot download it until the embargo has passed.
• Preservation. The CDR creates multiple copies of an object and monitors them over time to ensure long-term health.
• Indexing/discovery. The CDR promotes discovery of works both within the software and via external indexing sites such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

If you are interested in depositing materials in the CDR, email cdr@unc.edu and the repository staff will contact you with further detail.

NIH Public Access Policy

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requires that all peer-reviewed publications arising from NIH-funded research must be deposited into PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. The Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the public in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication. For detailed, step-by-step guidance on how to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy, please see our "NIH Public Access Policy and You" guide.

Effective January 25, 2023, NIH-funded researchers must also comply with the 2023 NIH Data Management & Sharing Policy. The policy requires researchers to submit a data management and sharing plan when they apply for funding, which they must then comply with.

In light of the 2022 OSTP Memo, the NIH is developing a revised Public Access Policy which will probably come into effect in late 2025. The policy is not yet finalized, but is expected to require NIH-funded research results to be made publicly accessible immediately upon publication.

Researchers affiliated with the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center can get additional help, as well as information specific to the Cancer Center Support Grant (P30 CA016086), from the UNC Lineberger Data Curation Team.

Other Funder Requirements

For more information on research funder requirements, see the MIT Libraries table of funder requirements The table summarizes major US Research funder open access requirements for publications and data, and includes links to information on related journal requirements.

The Scholarly Communications Officer provides guidance, policy development, and advocacy to faculty, students, and staff on the following issues:

• Copyright and fair use

• Authors’ rights

• Privacy rights

• Open access

• Policy related to scholarly material

For more information, visit the Scholarly Communications Office webpage, or contact Scholarly Communications Officer Anne Gilliland, MSLS, JD.