Research Guides: NIH and other Federal Open Access Policies: Additional Federal Open Access Plans

Department/Agency Open Access Plans summary

In addition to the NIH Public Access Policy, other federal agencies and organizations with budgets >$100 million developed and maintain department specific open access policies in 2015 further to the February 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on enhancing public access to federally funded research.

Administration for Community Living/National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (ACL/NIDILRR)
All full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles authored by NIDILRR grantees must be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) upon publication. Articles must also be submitted to the National Rehabilitation Information Center (NARIC) upon publication.
Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ)
The AHRQ Policy for Public Access requires that an electronic version of the author's final, peer-reviewed accepted manuscript of all AHRQ-funded research be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) upon acceptance by the journal, and be made publicly available within 12 months of the publication date.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
All peer-reviewed scholarly publications funded by the CDC (e.g. grant, cooperative agreement, contract, etc.) must be immediately available to the public for free and full use via PubMed Central (PMC) and the CDC Stacks website (https://stacks.cdc.gov/).
Department of Defense (DoD)
All peer-reviewed publications resulting from DoD funding must be made publicly available in the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). All scientific research supported by DoD funding must have a Data Management and Sharing Plan.
Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES)
All final, peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from IES or ED funding should be submitted to ERIC on acceptance to be made freely and immediately publicly available. Data sharing is required at the time of publication, or within five years of the end of the IES award if unpublished. Unique digital persistent identifiers must be established for all key personnel, publications, awards, and datasets.
Department of Energy (DOE)
All peer-reviewed, scholarly publications resulting from DOE-funded research must be made freely and immediately accessible through DOE Pages (the DOE repository). Access to scientific data must also be made immediately accessible. Use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research outputs, researchers, organizations, and awards is also required.
Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR)
Electronic, final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from ASPR-funded work must be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) upon acceptance for publication. Digital scientific data sets and data management plans are also required.
Department of Transportation (DoT)
All publications resulting from DoT-funding should be submitted to the DOT National Transportation Library (NTL) upon publication.
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
All peer-reviewed publications resulting from VA-funded research must be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) upon publication.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
All journal publications resulting from EPA-funded research should be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) within 30 days of publication. Scientific research data underlying a journal publication are to be posted to a publicly accessible data repository by the recipient within 30 days of journal article publication.
FDA-Regulated Drugs, Devices, or Biological Products in Clinical Trials
All clinical trials or research studies involving FDA-regulated drugs, devices, or biological products must be registered in the clinicaltrials.gov database within 21 days of the enrollment of the first study participant. Study population characteristics and summary results data must be deposited in the clinicaltrials.gov database within 12 months of study completion.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
The final published articles resulting from FDA-funded research should be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) within 10 business days of publication.
List of NIH Data Sharing Repositories
Find an appropriate data sharing repository from this list of NIH-supported data sharing resources. You can search by domain-specific or generalist repositories.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
All publications resulting from NASA-funded research must be submitted to the NASA Technical Report Service (NTRS - formerly PubSpace) upon publication.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
All peer-reviewed scholarly publications are required to be submitted to the NIST public access archive system upon acceptance of publication. Final published articles are acceptable provided the author has the right to submit the published version.
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Effective July 1, 2025, all final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of journal articles (the publisher's version if allowed) resulting from NIH-funded research must be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) upon publication, with no embargo period. Articles must have a PMCID (PubMed Central ID) that should be included when citing the article in NIH proposals, progress notes, and biosketches.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce
All publications resulting from NOAA-funded research must be submitted to the NOAA Institutional Repository (https://repository.library.noaa.gov/) upon publication.
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Peer-reviewed journal articles and juried conference papers, based wholly or partially on NSF support, must be deposited in the designated NSF repository. Either the final accepted version of the manuscript or the version of record may be submitted.
NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy
Under the Data Management and Sharing Policy (DMS), investigators and institutions must: 1) Plan and budget for the management and sharing of data; 2) Submit a DMS plan for review when applying for funding; and 3) Comply with the approved DMS plan.
Smithsonian Institution (SI)
Smithsonian-funded peer-reviewed journal articles should be submitted to one or more Smithsonian-managed or Smithsonian-approved repositories upon publication.
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
USDA grantees are required to make final, peer-reviewed manuscripts freely accessible to the public through the USDA public access archive system, PubAg (https://pubag.nal.usda.gov/), within 12 months of publication.
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
Accepted manuscripts must be deposited in the internal USLS Information Product Data System (IPDS) repository, and be made publicly available by the publisher at the time of publication. Persistent identifiers for publications, authors, and awards are included in the publication metadata as applicable.

Data repositories

Along with sharing the final manuscript of published research, authors may be required to share their data in a data repository. There is a range of repositories to choose from, including subject-specific and generalist repositories. For more on data repositories, visit the NIH Data Management & Sharing Plan guide.

NIH Data Sharing Repositories
The list of NIH-supported domain-specific data repositories that make data accessible for reuse and are open for both submitting and accessing data. All are compliant with the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy.
NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative
GREI repositories are intended to supplement NIH domain-specific data repositories, as a place to store NIH-funded research data that doesn't fit into one of those. GREI currently lists six generalist repositories that provide consistent metadata are are FAIR data compliant.
NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy
Other Federal agency data sharing requirements
re3data.org Registry of Research Data Repositories
International non-profit register of repositories that can be browsed by country, subject, or data type
NIH Data Discovery portal
Directory of 159 NIH datasets including the Dietary Supplement Label Database, Disaster Lit, Health Education, and EPA coal emissions data.

ORCiD & Biosketch Requirements

Per NOT-OD-19-109, NIH, AHRQ, and CDC grant recipients are required to have ORCiDs. Additionally, NOT-OD-21-110 and NSF 20-1 require researchers to use updated NIH and NSF biosketches formats for applications and supplemental documents.

To learn more about creating and updating ORCiDs, visit ORCID@GW on the Scholarly Publishing guide. To learn more about biosketches and how to use SciENcv to create properly formatted biosketches, visit the SciENcv guide. For assistance with ORCiDs, biosketches, or SciENcv, contact Himmelfarb Library at himmelfarb@gwu.edu.