Funding bodies stump up cash in open access agreement

"Three European funding agencies have signed an open access funding agreement with journal publisher Wiley-Blackwell. Germany’s Max Planck Society, the Austrian Science Fund – the country’s central funder of basic research - and Italian charity Telethon, which funds research into genetic diseases, will pay the open access fees of researchers they fund when they publish a paper in one of Wiley-Blackwell’s 1,500 journals. Like the UK’s Wellcome Trust, the Austrian and Italian bodies require articles reporting research they have funded to be made freely available online, and their agreement with Wiley-Blackwell relates to all of its 500 or so journals that have an open access option. The agreement with the Max Planck Society applies only to the publisher’s fully open access journals...."