Excerpt: One year on, advocates of free public access to scientific literature are calling a law that requires researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their manuscripts publicly available at the PubMed Central repository a success. At the same time, the measure continues to be challenged by a senior congressman and some publishers.Since the legal requirement that NIH-funded researchers make their manuscripts publicly available after acceptance for journal publication came into effect last April, the number of articles being approved by their authors for processing by the repository has more than tripled. In March 2009, 6,425 such original articles were approved by their authors for processing; a year earlier, the number was 1,852 (see graph)....Author compliance "has been dramatically altered" by converting an "anaemic" voluntary policy into law, says former NIH director Harold Varmus, now president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a keen supporter of open-access initiatives.
If you have questions regarding NIH compliance issues related to submissions of manuscripts, such as finding and determining PMID/PMCID numbers contact the Matas Library Reference Department, medref@tulane.edu.
