Peter Suber - Google+ - Unambiguous support for open access in Australia's 2012…

"'To capture the full value of the Australian Government’s research investment, ARCom [the Australian Research Committee] will provide advice on a whole-of-government approach for opening access to the outputs and data from publicly funded research.... '[pp. 42-43:] 'In 2006, the Prime  Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) Data for Science Working Group...recommended that there be open access to publicly-funded scientific data and that mechanisms be developed to enable the discovery, access and re-use of data....Australia is moving toward an environment where unmanaged and underutilised data sets can be transformed into managed, connected and findable data sets that researchers from all sectors can discover, access and re-use. Australia is also making data collected using public funds openly accessible for re-use by other parties. The Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce concluded that public sector information should be open, accessible and re-usable, suggesting that it should be free, based on open standards, easily discoverable, understandable, machine-readable and freely re-usable and transformable. Similar principles are increasingly underpinning policies on research publications and research data, with more and more research institutions and research funding organisations introducing open access policies....A recent study has estimated that the benefits to Australia as a result of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) having made publications and data freely available are likely to outweigh the costs by as much as a factor of five. The free availability of geospatial data by government agencies, which contributes to the growth and prosperity of major industries, was estimated to provide an even higher return than was the case for ABS data.... '[pp. 68-69, more on Action 6:] 'In principle, the results of publicly funded research should be widely available so that the maximum benefit can be gained from the knowledge created....In Australia, the NHMRC has adopted a mandatory open access policy on dissemination of research findings, requiring that any publications arising from an NHMRC supported research project must be deposited in an online institutional repository within a 12-month period from the date of publication. This policy came into effect on 1 July 2012 and brings the NHMRC in line with other international health and medical research funding bodies, such as the National Institute of Health in the United States, the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council. The ARC is reviewing its open access policy to bring it in line with that operated by the NHMRC. Presently, the ARC does not mandate that its grant recipients publish their research outputs in open access journals or make their research outputs available in open access repositories. However, the ARC strongly encourages the publication of the research that it funds in publicly accessible outlets, and has done so through its Funding Rules since 2007. It would be desirable to examine a whole-of-government approach on open access to publicly funded research so as to capture the full benefit of the government’s research investment....'"