The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a lengthy Hot Type article by Jennifer Howard, "A Push Grows Abroad for Open Access to Publicly Financed Research," covers a lot of interesting territory.
In Britain, the Finch Group Report recommended methods to broaden access to published research. David Willetts, British minister for universities and science announced that the government had accepted nearly all the Finch Group's recommendations. They then issued a Research Councils UK Policy on Access to Research Outputs. In exchange for publishers making individual articles available on Open Access (OA), the policy agrees that publishers should be able to charge extra money added onto subscriptions. The policy has been criticized by Stevan Harnad from the University of South Hampton (see keynote address), posted by the speaker at SPARC OA in Google Groups.
The European Union, on July 17, 2012, announced that it would make open access "a general principle of Horizon 2020" which is their framework for supporting research and innovation.
Denmark actually had their group of government councils make a statement strongly in favor or Open Access in June, 2012.
In Australia, Aidan Byrne, the new head of the Australian Research Council has spoken to newspapers claiming a "particular interest" in Open Access. This is a turn-around from his predecessor, Margaret Sheil, who "dismissed repeated calls to embrace open access," according to the Chronicle article.
The Chronicle article is definitely worth a read, but my link will probably require you have a subscription to read it online. If you want to find it in print, it is at page A10, of the Aug. 17, 2012 issue of the the Chronicle. It takes up just one newsprint page.
The Open Access logo on this page was featured at Eloquent Science blog in a post about Open Access.
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