Australian government open access policy for research publishing

It appears the Australian government is to adopt an open access policy for research:

AUSTRALIA has taken a great leap towards research results being freely available to all, supporters of the open access movement say.

The Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council - with total annual grants worth more than $1billion - are about to announce their first open access policies. ...
From: "ARC sold on open access to research", Bernard Lane, The Australian, December 13, 2006.

This followed a submission to the ARC by Professor Arthur Sale FACS, which I signed on behalf of the ACS (along with other organisations).

The ACS Digital Library uses the repository format which Professor Sale proposed to the ARC for distributing research results. This will therefore will be one of the first Australian systems outside a university to implement the policy. Larger universities are building their own digital repositories to hold research results, but the smaller ones may not have a suitable system.

Also the Productivity Commission has just released a draft report on the value to the Australian economy of such research:

"There may be a case for providing universities with some additional funding to demonstrate promising technologies so they can be more easily transferred to businesses. However, there are several options for supporting such transfer that do not involve a new dedicated funding stream."
From: Public Support for Science and Innovation, ARC, 2006.

To help make research accessible to business, I got the editor of JRPIT to put the more practical articles in the front of the journal and the scientific ones (with equations) at the back. The new AJIS is businesses orientated.