Author's Rights and Publishing Contracts: Public Access Policy

Public Access Policy refers to a series of open access mandates which apply to most taxpayer-funded research in the United States. Before 2024, only the largest federal agencies had public access policies, and allowed authors a 12-month "embargo" period between the publication of their article and making it publicly available in the agency's institutional repository. However, the 2022 "Nelson" Memo removed the 12-month embargo period, requiring immediate ("zero embargo") public access to federally funded research. The NIH Public Access Policy applies to articles accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025. Some other agencies have already released guidance, and all federal agencies are expected to release updated public access policies by December 31, 2025.

For agency-specific guidance, please refer to the following guides:

The Government Use License (2 CFR 200.315), sometimes referred to as the Federal Purpose License, is the federal regulation that allows agencies to enact public access policies. In most cases, the grant recipient or subrecipient retains copyright of their work, but must grant the federal agency this non-exclusive right as part of the grant agreement.

Under this license, "[t]he Federal agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes and to authorize others to do so. This includes the right to require recipients and subrecipients to make such works available through agency-designated public access repositories." More specifically, the Government Use License grants federal agencies the right to:

1. Obtain, reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the data produced under a Federal award; and
2. Authorize others to receive, reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the data for Federal purposes.

The Government Use License is also described in 45 CFR 75.322, which is incorporated by reference in every NIH grant agreement, which means it applies to all NIH grants even if the agreement was signed before the current policy was established. The specifics of how this non-exclusive license is used depends on the granting agency, but it is likely to be very similar for all U.S. federal agencies.

In order to comply with U.S. federal public access policy, authors need to retain the right to make a version of their work publicly available in the funding agency's repository. None of the agencies require a specific open license to comply with their policy, so almost all Open Access publishing options allow compliance. This includes any type of Creative Commons (CC) license, as well as most other types of open licenses. If you are publishing in an Open Access journal, or paying for Open Access in a Hybrid journal, you will almost certainly be able to comply with any U.S. federal funder's public access mandate. However, some private and non-U.S. funders have specific license requirements

If you are not publishing Open Access, or are otherwise unsure whether a journal or publisher meets your funder's requirements, here are a few words and phrases to look out for in publisher policies and publishing contracts. 

• Author Accepted Manuscript. Also known as Final Peer-Reviewed Manuscript or Postprint; the author's final manuscript including all revisions from the peer-review process, but without the publisher's final formatting and copyediting. This is typically the version of the article that federal funders ask for, and many publishing contracts grant the author more rights in this version than in the Final Published Article.
• Author Warranties/Representations. Most publishing contracts will include a section titled Author Warranties or Author Representations, which contains a series of statements that the author must agree with in order to sign the contract. Authors grant the NIH a "non-exclusive license" by accepting a funding award, so any contract requiring that the article is not subject to any previous licenses is inconsistent with the NIH Grants Policy Statement. However, NIH-funded authors can agree that they have not previously granted any exclusive licenses, because the Government Use License is non-exclusive.
• Self-archiving rights (Green OA). Authors can comply if they retain the right to "self-archive" or "deposit" their Author Accepted Manuscript or Final Published Article in the funder-designated repository. Publishing contracts often allow authors to self-archive in some places (e.g., a personal website, a noncommercial repository), but prohibit self-archiving in others. Authors should make sure that they have the right to self-archive in the funder-designated repository.
• Zero embargo. Under the previous Public Access Policy, authors were allowed a 12-month "embargo" period before their article had to be made publicly available, and many publishers' policies still require an embargo. In order to comply with the new policy, authors need to make sure that the publisher allows them to make their Author Accepted Manuscript available immediately upon publication, i.e., with a "zero embargo." 

If you plan to publish open access (or if you need to fulfill a funder's open access mandate), it is important to consider publication costs as a factor in your journal selection decisions. Most funders allow some publishing fees to be included in budget proposals, although it is difficult to predict how much funding will be granted. There are many different methods of open access publishing, which can make it difficult to anticipate publishing costs. The following resources are intended to provide a helpful starting point, with a different approach recommended depending on the type of journal you are considering.

Pay-to-publish

While traditional journals derived most of their revenue from subscriptions (i.e., "pay-to-read"), open access journals are free to read, so they have to find alternative sources of revenue. One of the most common business models among open access publishers is based on charging authors a fee to publish their article open access (i.e., "pay-to-publish"). This fee is usually called an Article Processing Charge (APC). Gold OA journals publish all of their articles open access, while Hybrid OA journals give authors the choice of whether or not to make their article open access.

Even if Gold and Hybrid journals typically charge APCs, it is often possible to publish open access for free, either through fee waivers or by depositing a different version of your article in a repository.

Gold/Hybrid Open Access

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): DOAJ indexes over 20,000 open access journals, and APCs are prominently included in the search results. However, they do not index all Gold OA journals, and they do not index any Hybrid OA journals.
• Publisher APC lists: Many publishers maintain central lists of APCs for all of their journals. For example, see lists from Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, SAGE (free for UNC-CH authors), MDPI, American Chemical Society, Frontiers, IEEE, and Cambridge University Press. You can usually find a journal's APC by searching the publisher's website for "APC list" or "open access fees."
• Journal websites: Most journals include APC information somewhere on their website. Check for these on pages including Instructions for Authors, Submission Instructions, Open Access, Editorial Policies, or other similarly named pages.

Free-to-publish

APC-based publishing is often assumed to be the standard method for publishing open access, but there are many alternative routes available. Some of the most common options are Diamond Open Access, Green Open Access, and Open Access Agreements.

Diamond Open Access

Diamond OA journals do not charge fees to either authors (through APCs) or readers (through subscriptions). These journals may be funded by grants or subsidized by scholarly societies, or may temporarily waive fees for promotional purposes. Many of them also rely on primarily or exclusively volunteer labor, in order to keep their articles both free-to-read and free-to-publish. Here are some resources for identifying them:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): DOAJ indexes over 13,000 Diamond OA journals, and allows users to limit their search results to only journals that do not charge publishing fees.
• Diamond OA journals are often small, community-led journals, but some are very prominent and high-impact. Some examples of Diamond OA journals where UNC-Chapel Hill authors have published recently are Environmental Health Perspectives (new submissions paused), Chemical Science, and Preventing Chronic Disease.

Green Open Access

If you publish in a subscription-based journal, or if you publish in a Hybrid journal without paying an APC, you might still be able to make a version of your article available in a repository, such as PubMed Central (PMC) or the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR). This is known as Green Open Access, but can also be referred to as "self-archiving" or repository-based open access. In many cases, Green OA is a free alternative to Gold OA that still allows you to comply with funder-mandated open access policies. Here are some resources to help identify journals that allow Green OA:

• Publishers and Journals Allowing Green OA Without an Embargo: Penn State University Libraries created a list of publishers that allow immediate (zero-embargo) Green OA without paying a fee.
• Open Policy Finder: This tool from Jisc can help authors to identify journals that allow compliance with funders' open access mandates and public access policies.

NOTE: Publisher policies are typically consistent with the terms in their contracts; however, it is important to ensure that your contract does not contradict your funder's policies. For help understanding your publishing contract, read How does the Government Use License affect my ability to publish? or contact Collin Drummond, Scholarly Communications Office (cdev@email.unc.edu).

Open Access Agreements

UNC-Chapel Hill has signed open access agreements with certain publishers, which allow grant discounts or waivers to UNC-Chapel Hill authors.  The University Libraries' Finding Author Support guide contains the most up-to-date list of open access agreements. If you do not qualify for an open access agreement but a co-author from another institution does, you may want to consider whether that author can act as the corresponding author.