The U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources released its strategic plan for 2009-2013 on September 16, 2008. (Thanks to Heather Piwowar.)
Strategic Initiative IV (Informatics Approaches to Support Research) contains the following action item under "Strategy 1: Facilitate information sharing among biomedical researchers":
Action Items: NCRR will:
Work to implement policies that encourage or require investigators to share data collected with NIH support and to describe their data-sharing plans in detail in their applications. ...
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
