A number of research funders have a policy on open access publishing. They even have earmarked funds to pay for APC (article processing charge). Despite positive carrots to motivate researchers to make research publications freely available it has been quite easy to dodge from the policy without bigger problems. Now though the funders have started to follow up on what has been made open access and not.
The two big funders (NIH, US National Instituties of Health & Wellcome Trust in UK) have grown tired and started to introduce a punishment on those researchers and research groups who do not follow the open access policy. They have stopped grant payments. Last year Wellcome Trust withheld funds 63 times because articles from the projects they funded were not open access. NIH says that since 2013 they have delayed payments to projects with continuing grants if publications have not been open access.
According to these two funders the number of research publications made open access has increased and more research groups are now following the rules. Read the article Funders punish open-access dodgers from Nature.
What about Sweden? The Swedish research Council and other funders have open access policy and the Council sys that they will start controling the policy. From 2015 only open access material will be accounted for when reporting back to the Council.
Whether the Council and other Swedish research funders will be using withholding payments as a way to get researchers to abide with the open access policy will be a later question.
Pieta Eklund