The Aus­tralian today is run­ning a story claim­ing that Inno­va­tion Min­is­ter, Kim Carr favors a regime whereby recip­i­ents of grants will be required to make their research find­ings pub­licly avail­able. This rep­re­sents a rev­o­lu­tion in the Aus­tralian research space and some­thing that has been sorely needed for a long time.

In the address, to be given to the Open Access and Research Con­fer­ence in Bris­bane, Min­is­ter Carr will appar­ently announce:

“Aus­tralia may want to con­sider mak­ing its own com­pet­i­tive research grants con­di­tional on recip­i­ents shar­ing their research results through open-​​access repositories.”

Not fait accom­pli by any means, but cer­tainly a strong push and much dif­fer­ent to the exist­ing regime.

Min­is­ter Carr’s announce­ment echoes the find­ings of the Cut­ler Review of the National Inno­va­tion Sys­tem, Ven­tur­ous Aus­tralia — build­ing strength in inno­va­tion, that states in Rec­om­men­da­tion 7.6:

“Open access require­ments are increas­ingly being intro­duced by research fund­ing organ­i­sa­tions and research insti­tu­tions world­wide. To date progress in Aus­tralia has been patchy and lack­ing the com­pre­hen­sive­ness and bold­ness of lead­ing coun­tries such as the UK.”

I per­son­ally con­sider this to be an excit­ing and ground­break­ing move and hope that Min­is­ter Carr and the Rudd Gov­ern­ment carry through on the promise. It augurs well for the future of inno­v­a­tive research in this coun­try as well as pro­vid­ing obvi­ous cul­tural, social and knowl­edge ben­e­fits to the coun­try at large.