Isn't that what this is http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ ?
"The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."
"The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."
> to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication
This new policy removes the 12 month embargo.
Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
All that's left is the upfront author's cost. That's often north of 1000$ now.
Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade.
The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods.
Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move.
Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.
The journals are a racket supported by government research. Peer review can be financed outside of locking out people from being able to read the final product.
The Gates Foundation is pushing for a lot less NIH syndrome and a lot more reuse I hope.