Breaking Into Uncharted Territory: Collaborating On NIH Public Access Policy Compliance with the Sponsored Projects Administration

Objectives: Non-compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy can severely hamper researchers’ efforts by delaying awards funding. Facilitating compliance with the policy can be a problematic process, especially across large institutions with numerous colleges, schools, centers and institutes. Collaborating with a department that spans all of these entities can ensure unlimited opportunities to provide compliance support and assistance.<p> Methods: In early 2013, librarians from the Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) were invited to meet with the training coordinator for the campus-wide Sponsored Projects Administration (SPA) to discuss potential collaboration to help with the potential ramifications of NOT-OD-13-042; the NIH Public Access Policy (PAP) notification concerning the delaying of processing of awards with start dates 1 July 2013. As part of this collaboration, SPA and a HSL librarian would co-present SPA sponsored workshops on the public access policy, an eRA Commons account would be assigned to provide access to the Public Access Compliance Monitor (PACM) and the NIH Manuscript Submission System, public access policy questions, issues and My NCBI /My Bibliography training requests received by SPA would be routed to the librarian and the creation of a detailed Public Access Policy Compliance library webpage that featured library and SPA resources.<p> Results: Collaboration with SPA began in Spring 2013. A Public Access Policy dedicated HSL email address, public-access@umn.edu, was shared with SPA and non-compliance questions that arrived at SPA were routed to this address for trouble-shooting. Assignment of an eRA Commons account by SPA increased the ability to “diagnosis and treat” non-compliant articles, as it facilitated access to the PACM, NIH Manuscript Submission System and awards view in My Bibliography. A detailed, SPA-user friendly website devoted to the policy, NIH Public Access Policy & Compliance was developed that included cross-references to resources found on the SPA training webpage. The first co-teaching occurred in November 2013 and followed by co-teaching engagements at the SPA training site, an auditorium based recorded webinar and workshops at departmental in-service training. Coordination with SPA has led to helping NIH investigators campus-wide that would not otherwise have thought to turn to HSL for help on compliance issues -- law, statistics, bio-sciences, chemistry or from the coordinate campuses. <p> Conclusion: Collaboration with SPA on NIH Public Access Policy compliance has exponentially expanded the services and scope that the Health Sciences Libraries is able to offer NIH investigators in their grant and research efforts, resulting in more research dollars awarded