Details of Energy Dept. Plan to Ease Access to Research Don't Please All - Publishing - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Last week, without much hoopla, the Department of Energy announced it had a plan for how to increase public access to the results of research it pays for. Unless you’re a grantee who might be directly affected, or a publisher, librarian, or open-access advocate whose job requires you to keep tabs on such developments, you probably missed the news altogether.But the announcement marks a new, pragmatic phase in the struggle between competing philosophies of how widely published research should be shared, and how quickly. And the policy makes its debut just as publishers and library and university groups are testing new mechanisms of their own to help research move more efficiently in a networked environment. Over the next year, how these pieces of scholarly-communication machinery mesh—or clash—should become a lot more clear...."