The NIH open access policy is being expanded to nearly all US Government-funded research (including NSF, DOE and NASA): http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-

The NIH open access policy is being expanded to nearly all US Government-funded research (including NSF, DOE and NASA): http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announces-open-access-policy.html http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce... 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.