If you're interested...

A bit of happy news for the science geeks among us: the US government announced last week that far more taxpayer-funded research papers will soon be freely offered to the public. This is an expansion of an older policy, which had previously only applied to biomedical science.

According to the Nature news blog, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren has asked all federal agencies that spend more than $100 million on research and development to plan to make their research results free to read within 12 months after publication. This new policy is expected to double the number of articles made public each year.