http://www.plos.org/The National Institutes of Health will no longer tolerate grantees who fail to submit manuscripts reporting the results of NIH-funded research to an open-access repository, as per the agency’s 4-year-old OA policy. Starting in spring 2013, the federal science agency will delay funding grants if any of the papers tied to the research it supports is out of compliance with the policy, which states that papers resulting from NIH-funded work must be accesible to the public on PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. Previously, the OA policy was only loosely enforced, if at all.
Director of the NIH’s Office of External Research, Sally Rockey, announced the agency’s attitude change in a blog entry posted last Friday (November 16). “When we put the policy into place in 2008 it was an adjustment for all of us,” she wrote. “But our work is not done as there are still publications—and as a consequence, NIH awards—that are not in compliance.”
According to a March report from the Executive Office of the President National Science and Technology Council, only 75 percent of eligible, NIH-funded papers had been deposited in PubMed Central as per the OA policy. “I encourage principal investigators to start thinking about public access compliance when papers are planned,” Rockey wrote. “Discuss with your co-authors how the paper will be submitted ...
