More and more manuscripts are landing in the US National Institutes of Health's free, online repository, according to the Nature News Blog.
In 2008, NIH mandated that all peer-reviewed articles stemming from studies it funded had to be freely available to the public within a year of publication.
Since then, a chart at the Nature News Blog shows, deposition of manuscripts into PubMed Central has increased, but, as the blog points out, it has "surged" in early 2013, possibly due to a late 2012 announcement that NIH would be more strictly enforcing its open-access rule. (Non-compliance, Sally Rockey noted at her blog in November, would lead to non-competing continuation awards from those researchers not being processed.)
May in particular saw more than 10,000 peer-reviewed articles landing in PubMed Central, as compared to the average 5,100 articles that were added per month from 2011 to 2012.
“Things have stepped up considerably," David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, tells the Nature News Blog.