APA stance on the NIH policy under review

The American Psychological Association recently posted a new policy on the APA Journals website informing NIH-funded authors that the APA will invoice their institutions a mandatory $2,500 "deposit fee" to deposit the author's final manuscript into PubMed Central. The policy also stated that authors were not permitted to deposit their manuscripts themselves (which is free).

The policy did not state what embargo period APA would set on the manuscript, but it appears that the APA did not intend to grant rapid open access to the article because of the fee—it was strictly a required deposit charge.

This policy, according to the APA's website, is under review by the APA, and is not currently in effect.

The Scholarly Communication and Publishing Committee is monitoring this situation closely and will post news as it becomes available. For further information, please feel free to contact Julie Schneider.

NIH third-party manuscript submitters may now designate an author of the manuscript to review the submission

NIH recently changed the manuscript approval process for third-party submitters. Previously the grant's PI was responsible for approving any manuscript submissions associated with the PI's NIH grant(s). Now in the final step in the submission process, Step 5 - PDF Approval, the third-party submitter (grant administrator, librarian, etc.) designates a reviewer for the submission. The reviewer must be an author of the manuscript.