ASA Modifies Copyright to Comply with NIH Public Access Regulations

In response to the mandatory National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy signed into law in late 2007, ASA has modified its copyright policy to allow authors to make their final accepted manuscripts publicly available in institutional repositories 12 months after publication.

This policy applies to all manuscripts accepted for publication after April 7, 2008, and is not being applied retroactively to manuscripts accepted prior to that date.

The policy allows authors to post the final accepted manuscript, defined as the version incorporating peer review but prior to copyediting and typesetting, into an institutional repository no earlier than 12 months after the resulting article is published in an ASA journal.

While the modification of the policy was initially precipitated by the law requiring investigators funded by the NIH to submit an electronic version of the final manuscript  to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, ASA decided to extend the policy to authors’ own institutional repositories as well.

The new ASA transfer of copyright form (which all ASA journal article authors are required to sign prior to publication) is available here. Questions regarding the new policy or its appropriate application may be sent to publications@asanet.org.