NIH will withhold grant money to enforce public-access policy : Nature Medicine : Nature Publishing Group

" ... On 16 November, the NIH announced that, starting as soon as this spring, any investigator who receives a research grant from the NIH and publishes the results in a scientific journal must submit an electronic version of the final peer-reviewed manuscript to the government's PubMed Central (PMC) repository to continue receiving federal funds. 'We spent money on the research, so they're telling us what we paid for,' says Neil Thakur, special assistant to the deputy director of extramural research at the NIH and the point person for the agency's public access policy. The NIH established its public access policy on a voluntary basis in 2005, asking grantees to submit a finished manuscript to PMC. Responding to low compliance rates, the Bethesda, Maryland–based agency then made the rule mandatory in 2008, requiring manuscript submission within a year of publication. Even so, only around 75% of papers stemming from NIH-funded research are submitted to PMC today, according to a 2012 report from the US President's National Science and Technology Council. This suboptimal compliance rate has prompted the NIH to try the new enforcement strategy. 'I expect it to increase our numbers quite a bit,' says Thakur. How quickly those numbers rise, however, will probably depend on how rapidly the 25% of researchers who do not already comply with the policy start doing so."