Professor Warwick Anderson, CEO of the NHMRC, recently announced that deposit of all council-funded research in an open source repository will be required within 12 months of publication. The policy will come into effect from 1 July 2012. More details of the policy change are available from http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/media/notices/2012/revised-policy-dissemination-research-findings

Protests against the US Research Works Act are escalating. You can sign a petition to register your opposition. The petition will be delivered to the US House of Representatives.

Though American signatories will obviously carry more weight, a display of worldwide opposition to the bill cannot hurt.

The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls, according to a Comment piece, Academic publishers have become the enemies of science, in today's Guardian.

Since 2009, publicly funded medical research outputs have been made available free of charge by the National Library of Medicine through PubMed Central. This has provided taxpayers with access to the medical breakthroughs their tax dollars pay for.

Open access should get a considerable boost from a new UK Government policy statement issued by the department responsible for innovation.

The statement, Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth, states:

The Council of Australian University Librarians has an Open Scholarship initiative (COSI for short).

Does open science make a difference? How do working methods change? What are the barriers to openness?

Just announced this week, the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) and Springer will launch a new Open Access journal, "Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation" or "IMMI". The news was released at the Materials Science & Technology 2011 Conference &amp

Scientist meets Publisher is a YouTube video that aims to get researchers thinking about signing away their copyright. Many researchers unthinkingly assign copyright to journal publishers in the mistaken belief that doing do is the only way to get work published.