Leaders of about 70 funding agencies have agreed to encourage open access to research publications stemming from work they fund, the Nature News Blog reports. The group gathered in Berlin for the annual meeting of the Global Research Council, and put together an open-access action plan.
That plan includes 14 action items, ranging from developing a way to fund a hybrid open-access scheme to supporting self-archiving to negotiating with publishers regarding the deposition if papers into open-access repositories. The details, though, "must remain a task for individual organizations," says Peter Strohschneider, the president of the German Research Foundation, according to the Nature News Blog.
The plan notes that it is "important to implement open access steadily and as swiftly as possible," but that it recognized that as "individual regions, countries, and funding agencies work from different backgrounds, they are likely to move at different speeds." Still, it adds, "it is expected that they will all move in the same direction towards fostering open access."