Funders Punish Open-Access Dodgers

For years, two of the world’s largest research funders — the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom — have issued a steady stream of incentives to coax academics to abide by their open-access policies.

Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available.

Neither agency would name those who have been sanctioned. But the London-based Wellcome Trust says that it has withheld grant payments on 63 occasions in the past year because papers resulting from the funding were not open access. And the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, says that it has delayed some continuing grant awards since July 2013 because of non-compliance with open-access policies, although the agency does not know the exact numbers...