September 2008

In accordance with Division G, Title II,  Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 ), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (http://www.nih.gov/) Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research (NOT-OD-05-022) is now mandatory.  The law states:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

This policy requires that a authors, upon acceptance for publication, resulting from research supported, in whole or in part, with direct costs¹ from NIH, submit to the NIH National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) an electronic version of the author's final manuscript within twelve months of the publisher's official date of final publication.

In order to meet this requirement and still encourage and support NIH research publications in the Cartography and Geographic Information Science journal, the Cartography and Geographic Information Society, which holds copyright to the CaGIS journal, has adopted the following policy:

Authors with research funded by NIH that is published in the CaGIS journal are required to wait 11 months before posting their CaGIS publication on PubMed.  It is the responsibility of the publishing author to submit to PubMed a copy of the final manuscript.  It is also required that the publishing author notify CaGIS of his or her compliance with this policy via email to cagis@acsm.net.