More good OA news

I go away for the weekend and find I've been blogged on Peter Suber's Open Access News blog - which is the OA-equivalent of being 'slashdotted' in the nerd world ;-)
I'll answer the resulting emails as soon as I can, I promise.

But there was some great news on Friday for the OA movement in particle physics and astronomy, as the UK-based PPARC mandated open access for research that they fund:

PPARC supports the sentiments in the RCUK position statement on research outputs and, following discussions with the other Research Councils, has decided that for grants arising from proposals submitted after 1 December 2006, it will be a requirement of the grant that the full text of any articles resulting from the grant that are published in journals or conference proceedings, whether during or after the period of the grant, must be deposited, at the earliest opportunity, in an appropriate e-print repository, wherever such a repository is available, subject to compliance with publishers' copyright and licensing policies. Wherever possible, the article deposited should be the published version.

In addition, the bibliographical metadata (including a link to the publisher's web site) must wherever possible be deposited, at or around the time of publication, in the relevant e-print repository.

This policy will be reviewed on completion, expected in 2008, of a project to be commissioned by RCUK, with the involvement of journal publishers, to investigate the impact of author-pays and self-archiving on research publication.