By Andrew Albanese

• Congress passed policy in 2007
• Voluntary compliance was four percent
• Now compliance rate nears 60 percent

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 grantees are now required to deposit their NIH-funded research papers, has risen significantly. The mandatory policy, which was championed by the library community and led by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coaliation), is seen as a vital initiative in increasing access to taxpayer-funded medical research.

According to NIH statistics, submissions to PMC began steadily climbing in December 2007, soon after it became clear a mandatory policy would be adopted for 2008. In January 2008, the first month following passage of the new policy, submissions to PMC hit an all-time high of 1255, and have continued to increase significantly every month so far this year. Submissions spiked from 1852 in March, to 2,765 in April, the month the policy officially took effect, and 2,593 in May. The figures for April and May represent more than double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 (1,198 and 948). See chart below.

Although official figures for June and July have not yet been posted, David Lipman, Director, National Center for Biotechnology Information for the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, told LJ that submission totals were steady and appear to be climbing.

Although it’s still too early to compute compliance rates, Lipman noted, the early returns suggested a “reasonable projection” would be a compliance rate “around 55-60 percent.” Those figures represent a stunning turnaround. In February, 2006, NIH reported to Congress that compliance rates under its voluntary policy lagged around four percent.