December 2018

INSTRUCTIONS FOR NIST FEDERAL PROGRAM OFFICERS AND EXTERNAL RECIPIENTS OF NIST FUNDS 

FOR DEPOSIT OF AWARDEES’ PEER-REVIEWED PAPERS IN PMC

Beginning October 1, 2015 all scholarly and technical publications created by NIST employees must be

submitted to the appropriate designated repository within a year after they are published. For peerreviewed journal articles this repository is NIH’s PMC1 (PubMed Central). Similarly and according to the 

terms and conditions of their funding agreements, external recipients of NIST funds must also make 

their peer-reviewed papers freely available to the public. There are several ways in which they can 

accomplish this. 

INITIAL QUESTIONS:

• Is the paper peer-reviewed? If not, NIST imposes no deposit requirements.

• Was the paper published in a journal whose publisher is a member of CHORUS? If so, there are no 

requirements for deposit in PMC.

• Has the paper been placed in a repository comparable to PMC in order to meet another funding 

agency’s requirements (e.g., NSF-PAR, DOE Pages, CDC Stacks)? If so, NIST imposes no additional 

deposit requirements.

PMC DEPOSIT INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE NIST FEDERAL PROGRAM OFFICER (FPO):

1. Go to NIST’s NIKE publications website, https://nike.nist.gov. Select ‘Click Here to go to the NIKE 

Application.’ Log in using your NIST general realm short username and password. 

2. Create a record for the peer-reviewed publication that will be deposited. 

3. Under ‘submit manuscript,’ select ‘initiate manuscript as administrator.’

4. Complete the form: 

• Include the grant number in the ‘Contract or Grant Number’ field at the top of the form. 

• Check the box for ‘ERB approval not needed’ and the radio button for ‘noting.’ Select 

‘acknowledgment of NIST contribution’ as the reason for noting. 

• Remember to enter the authors’ contact information under ‘add an outside author.’ You are 

not an author. [Note that if you are an author, the paper should have gone through NIST’s 

review and approval process, making the process described in this document unnecessary: the 

paper was uploaded to PMC when you completed the NIST-266.]

5. Submit the form using the button at the bottom of the screen. The record will not be sent for review 

although the division chief is shown as a reviewer. The screen view will change when the form is 

submitted.

6. Select ‘edit 266’ at the bottom of the screen and enter the final citation information. Upload a pdf of 

the paper to be sent to PMC. If you have more than one file, including supplementary materials, 

combine them into a single pdf file and upload it. One of NIST’s Research Librarians will be notified 

 1 NIH’s PMC repository began as a repository for peer-reviewed journal articles that were funded by NIH. 

Recently, PMC has partnered with other agencies (e.g., NIST, NASA, EPA, VA) to act as a repository for peerreviewed articles detailing research funded by these organizations. NIST has its own portal

(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/funder/nist/) into the PMC system allowing search on only NIST-authored

(and NIST-funded) papers.
December 2018

that you have completed this process and will submit the paper to PMC for you. [Note that deposit 

of data associated with the publication remains the responsibility of the funding recipient unless 

NIST chooses to maintain it through MIDAS; see https://inet.nist.gov/adlp/open-accessresearch/nist-funded-external-research.]

PMC DEPOSIT INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR/FUNDING RECIPIENT

1. After your NIST FPO creates a record of the publication in PMC, you will receive an e-mail from 

NIHMS (National Institutes of Health Manuscript System, nihms-help@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) asking you 

to acknowledge that the paper is yours.

2. After you acknowledge that the paper is yours, NIH sends the paper to a contractor for formatting. 

Once that is completed, you will receive another e-mail from NIHMS asking you to review the 

galleys. After the galleys are approved and any existing embargoes expire, your paper will be 

available from PMC via the NIST landing page at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/funder/nist/.