For assistance interpreting federal public access policies, please contact your subject librarian or librarians who specialize in a specific area of the policies. The specialist librarians are Stephen Wolfson for copyright and licensing, and Lauren Phegley for data management and data sharing.
You can also use the web form below to get in touch with a subteam of librarians who answer questions about federal public access policies.
The NEH public access policy went into effect on October 1, 2025, and governs NEH-funded research outputs associated with peer reviewed publications. This covers all new awards and competitive renewals.
In addition to any requirements listed in an individual award agreement, several aspects underly all funded research projects, including requirements to submit outputs such as papers or data. The policy mandates that research outputs must be made available without embargo by the date of publication.
Data produced by any NEH-funded project (specifically the Digital Humanities Advancement Grants, Research and Development, Documented Endangered Languages Fellowships, Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research, and State and Impact of the Humanities programs) will have specific data submission requirements outlined in the Notice of Funding Opportunity. Researchers must, instead, propose and adhere to plans outlined in a researcher-provided Data Sharing and Management Plan submitted to the NEH during the proposal process which outlines expected points of access and preservation strategies.
Researchers that receive a new awards from the NEH after October 1, 2025 are required to submit to the NEH any research outputs such as derived from activities funded in part or in whole by the NEH. Author-accepted manuscript versions of outputs (which is the peer-reviewed draft with all final revisions, figures, tables, and supplemental materials, but not the publisher-provided copy edited or formatted version) must be submitted to the NEH *no later than the publication date.* A publisher-produced “version of record” will be accepted if permitted by the publication agreement.
