Congratulations to open access advocates in the U.S. - especially the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, SPARC and SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, as well as Congress, the Senate, and the President who signed an Omnibus spending bill which includes a requirement that research funded by the National Institutes of Health be publicly accessible!
For full details, see the press release of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.
Here is the language that just became law (thanks to http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/oa-mandate-at-nih-now-law.html:
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
