How the new reporting requirement will help you
The new requirement should work to the benefit of Cornell authors. Deposit in PMC ensures that the research results will be preserved in a state-of-the-art digital repository. Free access after twelve months will maximize the visibility of your research and ensure that researchers and students around the world will be able to read and build on your work, regardless of their (or their library's) ability to subscribe to the journal in which the research is published. Preliminary research suggests that articles that are freely available are cited more often and have a greater impact rating than articles that are locked away behind subscription walls. As David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), has noted, "public access to publicly funded research contributes directly to the mission of higher education. Improved access will enable universities to maximize their own investment in research and widen the potential for discovery as the results are more readily available for others to build upon."
In 2005, the CU Faculty Senate strongly urged “all faculty to deposit preprint or postprint copies of articles in an open access repository such as the Cornell University DSpace Repository or discipline-specific repositories such as arXiv.org.” PubMed Central is such a repository.