Jun 28, 2010

NIH recently announced a new requirement for Project Investigators and Program Directors related to their publications listed in eRA Commons. As of July 23, 2010, PIs and PDs are required to use the My Bibliography feature in My NCBI to develop their publications lists.

NIH lists three goals for this change: ease investigators’ bibliography management, improve data quality, and ensure compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

Essentially, researchers will no longer manually enter citations in eRA Commons and will use PubMed and PubMed Central records to quickly import publication information to My Bibliography. Researchers can also manually enter citation information in My Bibliography for records that do not appear in PubMed and for conference presentations, patents, etc. References saved in My Bibliography will automatically appear in users’ eRA Commons accounts.

Gina Della Porta and Lori Delaney want to support CPC researchers with this new requirement. Please contact one of them if you have any questions or want assistance.

A brief FAQ with a summary of the requirement and links to helpful resources is posted here.

In brief, here are the required actions:

1. If not already established, Project Directors and PIs must establish a My NCBI account to gain access to My Bibliography.
2. My NCBI accounts must be linked to eRA Commons accounts.
3. As of July 23, 2010, eRA Commons will no longer support manual entry of citations. PD/PIs will no longer be able to type or copy and paste citation data into Commons and must enter new citations into their My NCBI accounts.
4. As of October 22, 2010 eRA Commons will no longer display citations that a PI has manually entered into Commons. All citations previously entered manually into Commons will be removed from the Commons system. Therefore, these citations must be added to My Bibliography so that they will continue to appear in Commons and can be associated with future annual progress reports.