Open access to research articles of publicly funded projects is one of the big topics in the age of electronic publishing. Many universities in Australia have set up repositories to store the publications of their researchers and make at least the meta-data accessible to the public. The ANU went even a bit further by making files of a large amount of journal articles available for whoever is interested in them.
Already last year the National Medical Health and Research Council (NHMRC) implemented an open access clause in their funding rules and now the second big funding body in Australia - the Australian Research Council (ARC) - dared doing the same. From now on all published research funded by the ARC has to be made publicly available within 12 month after the publication (with a bunch of exception of course, like: when the journal forbids it *sigh*). This is a great statement, catching up a bit with the big open access projects like PubMed, Narcis or ArXiv.
Big step in the right direction!
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