China promotes open access to its scholarly research

Nature : The National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have announced that researchers they fund will be expected to deposit their research papers in online repositories and make them publicly available within 12 months of publication. Similar to the policy set recently by the US National Institutes of Health and other institutions around the world, China’s new open-access policy is representative of what has come to be known as green open access (OA), whereby the authors of the research papers do the archiving. Although most organizations worldwide are tending toward green OA policies, the UK promotes gold OA, in which the publishers make the papers freely available on their own websites as soon as they are published. China’s announcement comes just before the 26–28 May meeting of the Global Research Council in Beijing, where implementation of last year’s open-access action plan is one of the topics to be discussed.