The US and UK plans may be similar in how they affect Wikimedia projects in that both make more research publications free to read, but they differ in numerous details (e.g. on whether the publications - and what versions thereof - should be freely available from the publisher or from a repository) In short, the White House directive means that about 19 US Federal agencies will have to develop, within six months from today, policies regarding read-access to publications about research they funded, similar to the Public Access policy implemented by the National Institutes of Health in 2008 (cf. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ ). It is not clear yet what this will mean in terms of reusability of materials from such publications, as the document is rather silent on licensing issues. For further information on the directive, see the detailed comments by Peter Suber, who puts it into the perspective of proposed similar US legislation (which, if adopted, would have a more permanent effect), introduced to Congress last week: https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/8hzviMJeVHJ . Daniel On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:47 PM, Richard Symonds <richard.symonds(a)wikimedia.org.uk> wrote: