NHMRC Grants and Publishing: All you need to know

Do you have an NHRMC grant or scholarship? Are you planning to publish soon? This post from Eloise Hollins, Scholarly Communications Intern, takes you through the open access requirements for when you publish.

The new Open Access Policy

You are now required to publish your research outputs open access, immediately and with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

In 2022, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) released a new Open Access Policy based on the principle that publicly funded research should be shared openly and at the earliest possible opportunity. The Policy mandated that research outputs must be open access immediately with no embargo and with a CC BY licence.

From 1 January 2024, the Policy now applies to all grants and scholarships awarded under NHMRC Grant Opportunity Guidelines.

The Policy is not prescriptive on how you should comply. This gives you the freedom to submit to your publication of choice and ensures you are not limited on where you can submit your manuscripts.

Making your outputs open access

We recommend the following open access pathways:

• Publish your article in an open access journal or where we have an open access publishing agreement

Article processing charges may apply that are covered by you, your institution, or a publishing agreement, depending on the specific journal. You can find details of the University’s publishing agreements, plus the journals that are covered, on the Open Scholarship website.

• Deposit your Author Accepted Manuscript in an open access online repository

This option can be used when your article is being published behind a paywall in a subscription or closed journal. No fees or article processing charges apply. You must include an author rights retention statement (see below) in your submitted manuscript. The Author Accepted Manuscript is then deposited without an embargo under a CC BY licence in an institutional or subject-based repository, such as Minerva Access.

Author rights retention statement

This research was funded in whole or part by the National Health and Medical Research Council [Grant number]. For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Where can I go for help?

For more information on how to comply with this policy please refer to the Library’s Open Scholarship website.

You can also email the Scholarly Communications team via scholarly-comms@unimelb.edu.au.