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NIH Public Access Policy

Describes the NIH Public Access Policy and compliance, including the process for obtaining PMCIDs

Make your bibliography public/private

To make your My Bibliography public

You may wish to make your My Bibliography public, especially if you provide a link to it in your NIH biosketch.

  • At the top of your bibliography, there is notation on whether your bibliography is public or private.
  • If your My Bibliography is private, click make your bibliography public, and click "OK" to confirm in the popup notice. A URL link will be generated that you can include in your biosketch. This link will display at the top of your My Bibliography, and in the My Bibliography section of your My NCBI (Dashboard) page. You can copy / paste this link into your NIH biosketch. This URL is persistent and will not change, even if you switch your My Bibliography from public to private and back to public again -- you will always have the same URL.
  • You can toggle your bibliography back to private by clicking on "Make bibliography private" and confirming the choice.

Hide publications in My Bibliography that are not authored by you

PIs of large awards (P awards, U awards) and training grants (Ks, Ts) will have many publications in their My Bibliography that are not authored by them, since any publication linked to an award will be automatically imported into the PI's bibliography.

If you have many publications in your bibliography that you did not coauthor, there's no fast way to set them all to "Private", but you can systematically work through your bibliography and hide them. Try these steps:

  • Publications linked to your awards will have the "Other citations" tag below the entry. Try doing a "find in page" command to highlight all of these, then click the checkbox next to each entry.

OR

  • If you have many awards for which you're the PI but not coauthor on publications, filter by each of your awards using the Filter citations menu and selecting a single award, and hit Apply. Click the checkboxes next to any entries on which you're not a coauthor.
     

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  • Once you have clicked boxes next to papers you wish to hide, go to the Manage Citations menu at the top of your bibliography and select Set to private. Your bibliography will refresh, and the "Private" tag will show under the citations. These citations will be visible to you, but invisible to anyone who views your bibliography through the public link.

Assigning Delegates to Your Bibliography

To assign delegates to your My Bibliography

Sometimes, you might want someone else to help you manage your My Bibliography (research administrators, research assistants, etc.). You can name them as "delegates" to your My NCBI bibliography. They can add references and, if they have eRA Commons accounts, can manage grant attributions.

  • After logging into NCBI, enter the settings page for your My NCBI account by clicking your NCBI username or the person icon in the upper right corner of any NCBI page (eg. PubMed)
    • Click Account settings

       
  • Scroll down the settings page to where you see the Delegates section and click Add a Delegate
  • Add the e-mail address of someone you would like to manage your bibliography, and click OK

    Note: Adding delegates will allow them to make additions to your bibliography and print out properly formatted bibliography reports, but they won't be able to make award-publication associations unless they sign in with their eRA Commons login.

  • The people you delegate will receive an e-mail asking them to confirm the connection

  • They will then be able to see your bibliographies under the My Bibliography section of their own My NCBI accounts (in the Dashboard and available as a dropdown in My Bibliography).

Printing a PDF Compliance Report from My Bibliography

The 2013 changes to non-competing progress reports require that investigators comply with the NIH Public Access Policy by assigning all publications to their proper grants on their progress reports. This is done through the electronic RPPR system, which pulls the publications from the PI's My Bibliography account.

Sometimes, though, you may need to create a PDF version of your My Bibliography to demonstrate compliance for publications on a previous RPPR.

To generate a PDF of your compliance from MyNCBI:

  1. Open My Bibliography
    Note: you must be signed into My NCBI via eRA Commons to access the Award compliance view for your My Bibliography
  2. Optional: Use the filter menu to filter the publications in your bibliography by your awards, or filter by searching for an author name, year, other PI's award, etc.

  1. Click checkboxes next to publications you want to include in the progress report, or click All at the top of the page to select all of the publications resulting from your filter, search, or all publications in your bibliography
  2. Go to the top of the page and click the Manage citations menu, then Compliance report (PDF)
  3. A pop-up box will prompt you to add the PI's first, middle and last names, and a starting page number (optional) for the report
  4. Click Download PDF button
  5. A PDF will be generated which will display the PI's name in the upper right corner of all the pages included in the report. The compliance status will be shown in the first column and the corresponding citations will be listed in the second column of the report.