• Does the manuscript apply under the NIH Public Access Policy? • Which NIH grant awards supported the manuscript? Use the NIH Grants Lookup Tool to confirm grant award numbers. • Which journal will the manuscript be submitted to? • Which method of submission does the journal fall under? See the NIH chart on submission methods. • If a Method C or D form of submission journal, which author will be assigned as the responsible author for the review and approval tasks? See the short video: Approving Submission of an Article to PubMed Central which outlines the process for authors in response to an email from NIHMS asking for approval of a submission done by a publisher or third party. • Which author will be responsible for making sure that the work has a PMCID within three months post publication of the manuscript, and notifying all authors and PIs associated with the manuscript of the most current means of documentation of compliance with the NIH Policy (“PMC Journal – In Process,” or NIHMS ID) until the PMCID is assigned?

In the months since passage of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) mandatory public access policy in late December of 2007, the number of submissions to the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) repository, where authors are now required to deposit their NIH-funded research papers, has risen significantly. According to NIH statistics, submissions to PMC began steadily rising in December 2007, soon after it became clear a mandatory policy would be adopted in 2008. By the first month following passage of the new policy, January 2008, monthly submissions to PMC hit an all-time high of 1255, and have continued to increase significantly every month so far this year. In April 2008, when the policy officially took effect, submissions spiked even more sharply, rising from 1852 total submissions in March, to 2,765 in April and 2,593 in May. The April/May 2008 figures represent well over double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 (1,198 PMC submissions in April ’07; 948 in May ’07). Although official figures for June have not yet been posted, the NIH’s Dr. David Lipman told the LJ Academic Newswire the submission totals were higher than May. It’s still too early to compute compliance rates, Lipman noted, but the early returns suggest a stunning turnaround. “Looking at the increase in submissions and the dramatic increase in journals signing PMC Publisher Participation agreements,” Lipman suggested a “reasonable projection” would be a compliance rate “around 55-60 percent.” Adoption of the “mandatory” NIH policy was spurred by abysmal compliance rates under the NIH’s first public access policy, adopted in 2005, which, after considerable pushback from publishers opposed to a deposit mandate, was scaled back to a voluntary policy at the 11th hour. In February, 2006, NIH reported to congress that compliance rates under the voluntary policy lagged around four percent. SPARC executive director Heather Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire she expected PMC deposits to remain strong, a

This is the hearing where Zerhouni estimated the NIH support for publication charges at 80 to 100 million/year

A year after the Wellcome Trust inaugurated its pioneering open access publications mandate in 2005, it commissioned SHERPA to undertake a quantitative study of how well publishers' existing policies were complying with its requirements. The study was based on a bibliography of 3,766 journal articles emanating from Wellcome Trust funded projects, and these were checked against copyright policies registered in the SHERPA/RoMEO database. The results revealed that 70% of the articles could have complied with the mandate, with only 5% definitely not complying. Since 2005, over 40 further research funders have also implemented open access mandates. Publishers have responded by adjusting their open access policies and/or introducing hybrid paid OA schemes in order to accommodate or even exploit funders' mandates. The resulting landscape is not a level plain. There are several ways in which a publisher may or may not comply with funders' rules. This paper will outline the results of the original quantitative study, and then compare this with a re-analysis of the data set against publishers' current revised policies. This will show how the level of theoretical compliance with the Wellcome Trust mandate has changed, and reveal the qualitative differences in how compliance is achieved or evaded. This theoretical compliance can then be compared with actual compliance. More generally, the paper will show how the landscape has changed over the past three years, and provide evidence for deciding whether or not funders' open access mandates have been a step in the right direction.

On April 23, 2009, the University Senate at the University of Maryland voted 37-24 to reject a proposed OA policy. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/04/faculty-votes-against-oa-policy-at.html The defeated policy would have encouraged green OA (deposit in the institutional repository), encouraged gold OA (submission to OA journals), and required neither. Is the Maryland vote ominous or anomalous? Either way, supporters of OA should try to understand it. Whatever its causes, they could arise again elsewhere. At the same time, we should understand why many stronger OA policies have been accepted at other campuses.