Draft post cleanup #7: Scamming Pubmed Central Deposition Rules

Yet another post in my "draft blog post cleanup" series.  Here is #7, from February this year.

I continue to be a bit annoyed by the Pubmed Central system for depositing your own papers there.  Well, actually, not annoyed with the existence of the system.  But am annoyed that you can only do it if you have an NIH grant ID associated with the paper you are depositing.  I am tempted to set up a system for sharing NIH grant IDs that would allow non NIH funded researchers to scam the system and to get their papers into Pubmed Central.  Almost certainly, people at NIH would not like this, but not sure whether this would be considered "illegal" or just "annoying".

And I am still unclear as to why Pubmed does this.  Genbank is NIH funded but will take sequences from any researcher no matter the source of funding for the work.  Anyway - I have not set up a NIH grant ID sharing system but if you want to submit an article to Pubmed Central and do not have an NIH grant ID, you might want to just ask someone who has one for a grant covering a similar topic at a similar time period.  I do not think NIH would figure out that the grant did not actually fund your work.  And you could even use the NIH grant search engine that pops up when you use the manuscript submission system or search Pubmed directly.  Not that I would recommend anyone break their rules or anything like that.