The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute's Institute Publications System, or IPS, was created in order to facilitate the submission of manuscripts for grant citation review and to address compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy. Our local system is described below (simplified). What is not described is faculty education in areas of compliance, author rights, and subjective decision making pertaining to where to publish articles

As of April 2008, the NIH will require PIs to contribute a copy of the author’s final manuscript to PubMed Central and later cite manuscripts by their PubMed Central ID number in progress reports and subsequent communications (including applications for funds) to the NIH. Given that PIs will not be the primary submitter of items to PubMed Central, including the correct grant number at publication is crucial. It is one key identifier that the NIH uses to match grant progress. It is also an indexed field for searching articles in PubMed.

The IPS brings together the conditions around grant citation approval, PubMed Central submission need, submission roles, and accountability for various steps in the process. Certain staff can track process through the IPS. Grant staff is the designated approvers of the grant citation, but the approval process includes notification for others who should know about requested changes. PIs are notified of processes, but only at critical times, like when a determination has been made about who will submit an article to PMC (publisher or SBRI). This system is available for use by all SBRI authors who receive NIH funding directly. For authors who are supported by NIH funds from a PI, the PI receiving the grant will be referenced throughout the IPS. A record of all transactions pertaining to the review and submission of the manuscript are contained within the IPS.

Authors (or designated scientific support staff) submit articles (at the time of acceptance for publication) to the [local] Institute Publications System. The system then determines which conditions apply to the article based on the funder and journal of publication. The article is routed to the grants office for grant citation confirmation. Approval and change requests are stored. Next, scientific support staff look up publisher policies as needed, create disclaimer pages, and upload items to the NIH Manuscript Submission system for deposit into PubMed Central. Once the embargo period has passed or a PubMed Central ID number is entered in the record, the item's status changes to Available in PubMed Central. As a final step, the IPS provides content for populating SBRI's institutional repository, E-prints. After submission status is known and a PMC ID number is entered, the item is routed for import to E-prints.

Seattle Biomedical Research Institute is a growing organization. We currently have nineteen principal investigators who publish up to 100 articles per year. We were able to build a beta system in a short period of time because we have quick access to administration, grants officers, legal counsel, support staff, information technology staff, and a librarian.