In January 2008, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) revised its policy on public access to publications resulting from NIH-funded research. The original public access policy was voluntary for authors. As of April 8, 2008, it is mandatory. The law that made it mandatory 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.

More information about the law and the NIH policy is available at grants.nih.gov.

The new policy means that authors whose research is funded by NIH are required to submit their papers to the federal online archive PubMed Central. The version that must be submitted is the manuscript after peer review, revision, and final acceptance for publication.

Radiology and its publisher, RSNA, will assist authors in complying with this NIH requirement. RSNA and the Editor of Radiology believe it is in the interest of science and scientific communication that the Journal publish and PubMed Central contain the exact same version of an article. This will help prevent confusion and inaccurate information in the scientific record.

Therefore, on behalf of authors RSNA will submit not only the version after peer review, but the final, published version, following RSNA copyediting and production processing. In compliance with the NIH public access policy, the RSNA will make the submitted articles open to the public 12 months after the date of publication in Radiology.