[3][4] In 2008, the policy was made mandatory by law in Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008).
[12] By April 2014, the NIH had increased enforcement of compliance with its Public Access Policy by delaying continuing grant payments for noncompliance.
[14] PACM provides users with a list of all PubMed citations associated with an institution's NIH funding and classifies the articles according to compliance status (i.e., Compliant, Non-Compliant, In Process).
"[15] In the first few years after the policy was introduced, there were two major legislative efforts to reverse it, primarily driven by some publishers' objections.
According to Patrick Ross, the director of the Copyright Alliance: "The mere fact that a scientist accepts as part of her funding a federal grant should not enable the federal government to commandeer the resulting research paper and treat it as a public domain work.
"[16] The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act was a bill sponsored by John Conyers in 2008 and 2009 that sought to reverse the NIH policy.