White House orders agencies to make the results of federally funded research available to the public — for free — in digital format within 12 months after its original publication.
I'm not convinced. While its great to have access to research, we should have access to the most up to date research, too. 12 months is too long. But I'm not going to complain too much, because I think this problem is gong to solve itself as open access journals become more and more mainstream. PLoS One and similar publications are great for the people, and I think everyone should try to publish in those journals as a first resort. They don't have the cache of Nature or The New England Journal, but its growing. And, I think most scientists care about being read more than anything else.
It's a good start, especially having it available digitally. As b_b stated, 12 months is too long. A lot can change with research over the course of a year. You could be reading a paper published 12 months ago touting a new technology only to find 12 months later from a "new" article that it has been debunked. But this will be very good for people looking to learn about well founded science and technology, and will also be good for the people writing these papers.
I don't really get why the $100M requirement is in there. That's a pretty exclusive group. Tons of great research is done at smaller institutions with NIH and NSF dollars. Do they think these places are too poor to buy a godaddy domain name and put their shit on the web?
It excludes many smaller agencies, but maybe those papers will get added into the bigger agencies research such as DOE, DARPA, NIH, EPA, NOAA, etc.
It's ridiculous. I have actually not cited work that I am pretty sure is relevant, because it was behind a paywall. If I find another open article that covered the same matter, I cite it instead. I am sure that some scientists cite articles, just based on the abstract, which is not behind the paywall.