This email came to me from Liblicense and I found it to be an interesting report of what one association's experience has been regarding the NIH Public Access Plan.
------
I thought it might be interesting to share the American Diabetes Association's experience with the PMC system for author manuscripts, since ADA is fairly unusual in allowing authors to post their accepted manuscript immediately upon acceptance. Thus, the posting of Diabetes and
Diabetes Care papers on PMC shows how successful the NIH system is absent any publisher-mandated delay. The success of the system with articles in our journals goes to the question of whether author failure to comply with the system can be attributed to publishers, or rather to the resistance of researchers and universities to comply with the system.

Since the PMC system's debut, Diabetes has accepted 134 original articles, and Diabetes Care has accepted 122. In 2004, 39% of Diabetes manuscripts were NIH funded, as were 15% of
Diabetes Care manuscripts. Using those percentages, we would expect that 53 Diabetes manuscripts and 18 Diabetes Care manuscripts were NIH funded since the start of the PMC system.

To date, one author manuscript from either journal has been posted on PMC.

Chu K, Tsai MJ. Related Articles, Links Neuronatin, a downstream target of BETA2/NeuroD1 in the pancreas, is involved in glucose-mediated insulin secretion.
Diabetes. 2005 Apr;54(4):1064-73. PMID: 15793245 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

[Incidentally, it is the wrong version of the manuscript.]

My conclusion is that lack of compliance with the NIH plan is primarily the responsibility of NIH. I suspect that researchers are not at all convinced of the value of the system [researchers I know are openly hostile to it, and see it as yet another bureaucratic burden or little benefit to them]. It may also be that the manuscript submission system or the PMC site itself is not perceived as user-friendly.

Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
-------

I am wondering if we aren't asking too much of our authors? There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding NIH Public Access Plan.

• Some publisher's support it while other do not, so what kind of message does that send to the author?
• According to a FAQ from FASEB's Issues Authors Should Consider Regarding the NIH Enhanced Public Access Policy, "Unless you receive instructions from the journal regarding their participation in PMC, authors should assume they are responsible for submission if they opt to comply with the NIH policy." How many journals besides FASEB have told their authors this? Are some authors assuming the publisher will "take care of it?"
• Copyright...ugh... Do authors want to even deal with the copyright issues regarding their articles? Authors are responsible for abiding by the specific journal's copyright agreement. So that means that the author must actually read it before they sign it and or contact their publisher to find out whether their copyright agreement allows them to submit manuscripts to PMC. This can be confusing for an author.
  
  For example: The Journal of Hospital Librarianship (copyright transfer form), I recently had a paper accepted for publication and I inquired with the editor as to whether I could prepublish the accepted paper on my website. I was told "certainly not before it is published." Yet section 1 C of copyright transfer form says, "retain PREPRINT DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS, including posting as electronic files on the contributors own Web site for personal or professional use, or on the contributor's internal university/corporate intranet or network, or other external Web site at the contributors university or institution, but not for either commercial (for-profit) or systematic third party sales or dissemination, by which is meant any interlibrary loan or document delivery systems. The contributor may update the preprint with the final version of the article after review and revision by the journals editor(s) and/or editorial/peer-review board."
  
  An author can get two different messages regarding copyright, so why risk it?

As you can see each publisher has their own policies regarding the NIH Public Access Plan, (Information regarding policy for Chest, APS, FASEB) it would not surprise me in the least if authors are confused and therefore do not wish to be bothered "dealing" with submitting to the PMC.