Aging Cell manuscripts on the road to PubMed Central: shifting from manual to automatic transmission

Many of our authors, and readers who we hope will send papers to us for publication, have some part of their research laboratory work funded by a grant from the US National Institutes of Health. Each NIH-funded investigator has by now received announcements about a new NIH policy, which requires that the accepted manuscript versions of all papers that include NIH-funded data be made available in PubMed Central (PMC) within a year after the article is accepted for publication. NIH has left it up to individual authors and publishers to work out a way to comply with this new regulation. The publishers of Aging Cell, Wiley-Blackwell, have worked out a method to assist authors to meet these requirements in a painless and transparent way. Each paper that includes NIH-funded data and is accepted for publication by Aging Cell will be sent to PubMed Central automatically, on behalf of the authors, and the paper will thus be available for download 12 months after the date of publication. The manuscript presented will not be the final, published version with its elegant typesetting and arrangement on the page; for this, readers will still need to purchase a subscription to the journal or talk their hometown libraries into obtaining electronic rights to Aging Cell. The publishers are working with NIH to try to persuade them to offer, at PubMed Central, a reciprocal link to the published version of the paper to complement the manuscript deposited at the public site. As Editors who are also readers and writers of scientific papers, we are sensitive to all sides of the ongoing discussions about how best to develop a system that combines the advantages of the old-fashioned process (high quality peer review, useful advice to authors of accepted and rejected papers, and an attractive venue filled with hot news and valuable review articles) with the more recent opportunities for convenient, inexpensive, universal availability of scientific reports. The decision of Wiley-Blackwell is a ‘win-win’ here, which will help our authors (the NIH-funded subset, anyway) meet their responsibilities to their funding agency with minimal fuss, and will help the publisher and our sponsors at the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland by offering yet one more good reason for you to consider sending your next top-drawer paper to Aging Cell for consideration.