The key language notes that the Whitehouse has "issued a memorandum today [...] to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research a

The key language notes that the Whitehouse has "issued a memorandum today [...] to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication." This suggestion is similar to the NIH public access policy (adopted in 2008), which requires the results of NIH-funded research to be made freely available within 12 months of publication. The new memorandum gives agencies some freedom in how they respond - they don't need to adopt exactly the NIH policy - but it is clearly in the same spirit. Here's an analysis from Peter Suber, a leading advocate of open access: https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/8hzviMJeVHJ https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/8hzviMJe... Suber focuses on the connection to FASTR, a major piece of open access legislation introduced into Congress a few days ago. Broadly, FASTR has a lot of overlap with the White House directive. FASTR would require every Federal agency with a budget over 100 million to adopt an open access policy. A significant difference - and one that I expect is of interest to HN - is that FASTR has provisions to enable text mining. That would potentially be of interest to some startups. Much more info here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Fair_Access_to_Science_and_Technology_Research_Act http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Fair_Access_t... If you'd like to support open access, take a few minutes to look at the Alliance for Taxpayer Access's (ATA) call to action on FASTR: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/FASTR_calltoaction.shtml http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/FASTR_calltoaction.shtm... It is also of interest to follow the responses from John Wilbanks and Heather Joseph, two of the authors of the petition (and long-time advocates for open access): https://twitter.com/wilbanks https://twitter.com/wilbanks https://twitter.com/hjoseph https://twitter.com/hjoseph Wilbanks notes that the memo covers research from "NSF, Ed, EPA, NASA, USDA, HHS, Commerce, Interior, Defense, Energy, Trans, DHS, Ag, State, Smithsonian". He also implies that while this memo is great progress, it falls short of a full open access mandate enabling reuse and text-mining of content.