Toronto Blue Jays feeling Toronto blue, eh?

Agreed. A great game, but heart-wrenching ending.

That ball caromed off a Bucs DL's helmet too (despite remaining a perfect spiral). Not sure how much of that I'd hold against Darnold.

Great pun but sadly inaccurate (I liked it so much I read the methods section). Unfortunately, no Kelp chloroplasts were stolen in the making of this mind-melting manuscript.

Congratulations @ching-hochang.bsky.social and @hsiehyp.bsky.social !! Excited for you both!

Thanks, and good luck!

In the end, I am tickled that our lab’s first paper was also a first for Elsevier. At least we got a good story out of the situation.

Or two good stories, if you also count @luis840alberto.bsky.social’s first paper. And you should! You can read it for free right here: www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

I suspect there may have options to avoid the open access fee or that allowed me to upload the author-accepted manuscript to PMC.

But I am a *cliché* assistant professor that wanted (and still want) no unnecessary enemies. I played it safe.

FWIW, I have read that any conflicting policies between the Federal Government and a publisher default to the Feds (see #5 in the link below, thanks to colleagues for this resource).

www.authorsalliance.org/2025/06/06/t...

I ❤️ open access so was always planning to pay the OA fee. If I had less (flexible) money or hadn’t been proactive and persistent with my emails, it would have been very easy to fall out of compliance.

I expect/hope that the path to compliance will become easier (and cheaper) in the months to come.

Everyone I emailed at Elsevier and the NIH were nothing but polite and – to the extent they could be – helpful.

As things stand, however, full compliance with both parties is tricky. For me, it required ~$9400, some clarifying, and careful maneuvering.

I emailed the NIH Office of Science Policy (who were amazing). I was assured that NIHMS processing times would not impact my compliance. I should just upload the version of record when it came.

A few more Elsevier emails and I had the VOR. I sent it to NIHMS and complied with everyone’s policies. 🤞

But the version of record is typically ready just days before online release. And NIHMS can take weeks to process manuscripts for PMC. How to comply?

But what about author-accepted manuscripts? I had read that I could upload that version.

Well, Elsevier only allows uploads of author-accepted manuscripts after a 12-month embargo period. So, it had to be the version-of-record (again, per Elsevier emails).

This NIH policy required our paper to be at PubMed Central without embargo upon its publication. Per emails with Elsevier, there was only one way to comply with the NIH AND their sharing policy:

Purchase Gold Open Access (~$9400) and self-upload my article’s version-of-record to PubMed Central.

Our paper was ‘accepted in principle’ in late June but not formally accepted until early July.

So, it was subject to the recently revised timeline on the NIH Public Access Policy, which impacted papers accepted for publication after July 1st.

grants.nih.gov/policy-and-c...