New Requirement for Complying with NIH Public Access Policy Using My NCBI

Beginning July 23, 2010, program directors and principal investigators (PD/PIs) must use My NCBI’s “My Bibliography” tool to manage their professional bibliographies. They will no longer be able to enter citations manually into eRA Commons as a method for complying with the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy.

In an effort to reduce manual entry of citations and increase the quality of data, eRA Commons has partnered with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to link NCBI’s personal online tool, “My NCBI,” to eRA Commons. My NCBI offers an online portal called “My Bibliography,” which allows users to maintain and manage a list of all their authored works, such as journal articles, manuscripts accepted for publication, books, and book chapters.

As of April 2010, linking a Commons account to a new or existing My NCBI account allows references saved in My Bibliography to automatically appear in users’ Commons accounts. An additional benefit of this integration includes the ability for grantees to easily track compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy using a simple color-coded key in My Bibliography. Please see the National Library of Medicine Technical Bulletin for more information on this new feature.

Users can log in to My NCBI and access My Bibliography from eRA Commons, or they can log in directly to My NCBI using their Commons username and password.

According to NIH, required actions for PD/PIs include the following:

1. If not already established, PD/PIs must establish a My NCBI account to gain access to My Bibliography.
2. My NCBI accounts must be linked to eRA Commons accounts.
3. As of July 23, 2010, Commons will no longer support manual entry of citations. PD/PIs will no longer be able to type or copy and paste citation data into Commons and must enter new citations into their My NCBI accounts.
4. As of October 22, Commons will no longer display citations that a PI has manually entered into Commons. All citations previously entered manually into Commons will be removed from the Commons system. Therefore, these citations must be added to My Bibliography so that they will continue to appear in Commons and can be associated with future annual progress reports.