Self-Archiving Mandates

Below is Peter Suber's excellent summary table (excerpted from his original article in Open Medicine), listing (and correcting) the most common misconceptions about the NIH Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate.

Note especially the update addendum at the end: NIH's is indeed an Immediate Deposit (IDOA) Mandate (what Peter calls a Dual Deposit-Release Mandate). (I.e., it is not a delayed-deposit mandate.)

Peter also corrects the common error about locus of deposit: the NIH deposit needs to be made in PubMed Central, not in PubMed.

[I would add, however, that it would be infinitely better for worldwide OA if NIH's stipulated locus for the direct deposit were the fundee's own Institutional Repository (from which it could simply be harvested/imported/exported to PubMed Central). That would help enormously to integrate and universalize all Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates, from universities as well as funders, systematically scaling them up to all universities and research institutions worldwide, covering all research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, in a convergent, mutually reinforcing synergy.]

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More on the OA mandate at the NIH

Peter Suber, An open access mandate for the National Institutes of Health, Open Medicine, April 16, 2008.  Also PDF. 

Table 1: Common misconceptions about the new NIH open access policy
Fiction	Fact
The mandate is to publish in open access journals.	The mandate is to deposit in an open access repository (PubMed Central).
The mandate is to bypass journals and peer review.	The mandate is to provide open access to articles already published in peer-reviewed journals.
The mandate applies to the published version of articles.	The mandate applies to the final versions of the authors’ peer-reviewed manuscripts.
The mandate directs deposits to PubMed.	The mandate directs deposits to PubMed Central.
The mandate requires a 12-month embargo on the copy in PubMed Central.	The mandate permits an embargo of up to 12 months on the copy in PubMed Central.
The new NIH budget is US$29 million.	The new NIH budget is US$29 billion.
The new mandate will last for only 1 year.	The new mandate will last indefinitely.
The mandate requires violation of copyright law.	The mandate requires compliance with copyright law.

Peter Suber:  This table is based on the most common misconceptions I'd heard in the first month after the policy's adoption.  Now I'd add at least one more. 

Fiction:  The policy requires deposit at the end of the embargo period. 

Fact:  The policy requires deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication.