For more on the costs of scholarly publishing see Publishing Facts Why is open access getting a lot of attention lately?
In 2008, a policy emerged from the NIH that requires its grantees to submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication by an independent publisher to a government database called PubMed Central, a freely accessible database, within a year of publication. The NIH uses the manuscripts primarily to support its own operations. Similarly, there have been mandates from other funding bodies (particularly in Europe) and universities to require Web posting of author manuscripts, under varying terms and conditions. However, NIH and the funding bodies also make these articles available to the public, the same market whose subscriptions financially support the journal publishing process. Discussion of the impact of the NIH policy and these other open access mandates has been increasing. The NIH does not provide any funding to publishers. It should be noted that the NIH has not taken advantage of the opportunity to make accessible to the public the reports that it receives from
