I’m so proud of my home state, California! They’re leading the way to make sure that publicly funded research conducted by the Department of Public Health is openly available to the public. Beginning in January next year, over $200 million in annual research that is paid via California taxpayers will be open access (with some restrictions, such as a twelve month embargo. Here’s an excerpt:

The legislation requires researchers whose work is supported by a fully or partially state-funded grant, and has been accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed journal, to submit an electronic version of this resulting article to a publicly accessible database. The database itself is not specified; suggested options include the University of California’s (UC) eScholarship Repository at the California Digital Library (CDL), PubMed Central, or the California Digital Open Source Library (CDOSL). The article would then be made publicly accessible through the California State Library no later than 12 months from its publication date. (If work has previously been submitted to a repository to satisfy OA requirements from another institution or funding agency, the researcher only needs to supply a link to that article to the funding agency and the California State Library.)

AB 609 does not call for mandatory open licensing. While most work deposited in CDOSL is required by California Education Code to bear a Creative Commons CC-BY attribution allowing others to “use, distribute, and create derivative works based upon the digital material while still allowing the authors or creators of the material to receive credit for their efforts,” material deposited under AB 609 is exempt from this condition. All work will be listed and linked to in an online bibliography.

AB 609: California Leads on Open Access to Publicly Funded Research.