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REALLY IMPORTANT ANALYSIS My opinions, as opposed to analysis and reportage, is shown in square brackets below. Firstly, I wish to confirm Peter Suber's analysis of the Australian Research Council's decision in its funding rules, announced last week. See http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/DP08_FundingRules.pdf, Section 1.4.5 if you want to read the original in context. The ARC has basically said that it expects research funded by it to be made open access. If not, the grantees have a prior onus placed on them to explain why not in their Final Report. [Given that the research articles have been published, I cannot imagine any good justifications. 'I ignored the statement and signed away my rights to a publisher' will probably be considered a poor excuse by the ARC and may be considered by researchers to have deleterious effects on future grant success. It would have to wrapped up in language like "I chose this journal which wouldn't let me make an exception in the publishing agreement, but it is really the very very best journal for this article". Not many people will get away with it or want to make the argument. Quicker and easier to do as requested.] By my assessment of the actual situation, the ARC has just enacted a mandate on its grantees, thus joining the several RCUK Research Councils. What has always been needed is simply a policy decision (which the ARC has made), a reporting requirement (ditto), and a routinization of OA deposit (which will follow). Congratulations to the ARC. [Why did it take this particular tack? Well as I have written previously Australians have a cultural myth of independent action, and don't like to be commanded what to do in the language of 'mandate'. But using the right language, they will do as required.] This mandate will be reinforced by the forthcoming Research Quality Framework in 2008, which requires (on pain of getting no research funding for six years): (a) each university to have access to a repository, (b) during 2007 deposit in that repository all research output published in 2001-2006 inclusive that it intends to use in its evidence portfolios, and (c) make that research output available electronically to RQF assessors (not necessarily OA). Once each university has a repository (or shares one), and most academics have deposited research publications, a transition to regular OA deposit will be almost natural and semi-automatic. What we always needed was routinization: a mandate was just the only known way to induce that routinization, and that is what we have now got. On top of that the RQF panels will mostly look at citation statistics, so immediate deposit OA will be rapidly perceived as highly desirable with the 2014 RQF in mind. There is other news in the wings. The National Health & Medical Research Council (the second of Australia's two research councils) is said to include the same language as the ARC in its guidelines when they appear. And an even more important over-arching statement is also expected in the near future covering the conduct of all research in Australia's universities and government research agencies. Further, work in the Department of Education, Science & Training is tackling the accessibility of research data, which is a much more difficult task than open access for published articles. In summary, an open access sea-change is happening in Australia. It will take about a year to become fully fledged and unmistakeable to all, but it is inexorable. The key decisions have been taken at governmental level and I expect to be able to say in 2008: "Look, Australia is 100% OA (or near enough)". My congratulations to all those involved in these decisions. To everyone worldwide, please celebrate with me. Arthur Sale Professor of Computing (Research) University of Tasmania