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Writing, Citing, & Publishing

Learn about resources to help you through the writing and publication process.

Using an Institutional Repository

Authors should consider making published works openly available using an institutional repository. Prism is Northwestern Medicine’s institutional repository for making scholarly outputs openly available.

Examples of items accepted by the repository:

  • Research papers, published or unpublished
  • Conference papers and presentations, including lectures
  • Educational materials
  • Supplemental images
  • Open access books
  • Datasets (up to 2GB)

Please note: If you are interested in depositing your published outputs into Prism, you must check if the publisher allows deposit in a repository, and if so, which version of the manuscript is allowed for deposit. See the Copyright section for more information. Or contact Prism for assistance.

PubMed Central and Public Access

​PubMed Central (PMC) is a free repository of full text scholarly articles. In compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy, researchers are required to submit a copy of any manuscript that resulted from their NIH-funded research (from April 7, 2008 onward).

Some publishers submit content to PMC simply to make their content openly available.  If your publisher does not participate in uploading content to PMC, or if your research was not NIH-funded, then your work will not be found in PMC.

If you want your work to be made available in an online repository, see the section above on “Using an Institutional Repository” to learn more about Prism.

See our NIH Public Access Policy guide for more information on the logistics of submitting papers to the NIHMS system and maintaining compliance with the NIH’s Public Access Policy.