Obama administration enacts (qualified) open access

The Obama administration has announced that all research funded by federal agencies (with R&D budgets greater than $100 million) should be made open access within one year of publication:

To that end, I have issued a memorandum today (.pdf) to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication. As you pointed out, the public access policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health has been a great success. And while this new policy call does not insist that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, it does ensure that similar policies will appear across government.

It’s not clear which agencies are covered by this memo, but at the very least it includes NIH (which already has an open access policy in place), NSF, DARPA, NASA, NIST, and NOAA.

I’ve also been trying to get a sense of how much scientific research is funded by government agencies, to see what percentage of published research is likely to be affected.  I imagine it varies quite a bit from field to field.  Industry funds a huge amount of, say, pharmacological research, while social psychology and physics seem more government based.

It may also be worthwhile to put pressure on major private donors to adopt an open access policy now that the government has done so.