If UK researchers thought they would catch a sneak glimpse of June’s hotly anticipated multi-year spending plan for science in today’s 2013 budget, they were disappointed. In his budget speech, Chancellor George Osborne gave a tantalizing hint that “existing protections” would apply for future spending — meaning that research budgets may be left undamaged — but made no specific mention of science.

The only announcement that might affect cash for research this year was indirect: a 1% cut from the spends of many ministerial departments, including that responsible for science, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. This will not directly affect research grant money, but departments might make savings by cutting their own research spending.

And so the budget leaves British science funding largely where it was: that is to say, eroding slowly up to 2014–15. To summarize the events of the past four years: in the 2010 four-year spending plan, although it promised to protect science grant money, the government slashed funding for research infrastructure. Since then, it has been slowly re-injecting the lost cash, in successive annual budgets announcing money for areas such as graphene, synthetic biology, energy storage and advanced materials.

Osborne seemed to have rediscovered a love for science as an economic driver — and he expressed that love by giving back some of what had been cut. (But not quite all — planned spending for grants and associated infrastructure in 2014–15 is still some 7% lower than in 2010–11, and that does not include further losses from inflation, according to analysis from the London-based Campaign for Science and Engineering.)

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Posted on behalf of K.S. Jayaraman.

For the second year in a row, scientists in India feel let down by a government that promises large funding boosts for research — but isn’t delivering the goods in its budget.

In January, prime minister Manmohan Singh said the country should aim to double its research expenditure by 2017, to reach 2% of its gross domestic product. Under a new policy on science, technology and innovation, India was supposed to be increasing its number of scientists by 66% by 2017, and enhance private-sector participation in research; the spending targets were also proposed in a five-year plan released in December 2012.

But the government’s proposals in India’s 2013–14 budget, released last week, indicate that it is actually trying to cut research spending. Nine research departments* share some US$6.9 billion, a mere 4% more than budgeted for 2012–13, and below the rate of inflation. (The exact size of India’s government research spend depends on which ministries are included in the calculation.)

In fact, the previous year’s budget for those departments was subsequently revised downwards by some 30%, so that some reports (such as that of SciDev.Net) say the new budget — compared to last year’s revised figures — represent a substantial boost. Other reports, such as Science Insider‘s, call the budget lacklustre.

Last year’s budget — even before the revisions — was itself disappointing, as the country is reining in spending across the board.

“The resources allocated to science and technology are a matter of concern,” says Ajay Sood, a physicist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a former president of the Indian Academy of Science. “This resource crunch has come at a time when the science scene in India was beginning to look good.”

C.N.R. Rao, who heads the prime minister’s science advisory council, says that he is glad that science at least escaped big cuts. “I am told that the promised big spending will start from 2014,” he said. “I hope so. But next year is the election year and I have no idea what will happen [to the promises made by this government].”

*Budget documents used from departments of atomic energy, health research, agricultural research, Earth sciences, space, defence research and the Ministry of Science and Technology’s departments of biotechnology, science and industrial research and science and technology.

In a long-awaited leap forward for open access, the US government said today that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be made free to read after a year’s delay — expanding a policy that has, until now, applied only to biomedical science.

In a memo, John Holdren, the director of the White House office of science and technology policy (OSTP), told federal agencies to prepare plans to make their research results free to read within 12 months after publication.

“The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for,” the memo says. The OSTP also tells agencies to maximize public access to non-classified scientific data from research they fund.

The policy applies to all federal agencies that spend more than US$100 million on research and development, and is likely to double the number of articles made public each year. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has since 2008 required research to be publicly accessible after 12 months. “This new policy call does not insist that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, [but] it does ensure that similar policies will appear across government,” Holdren wrote today in a separate response to a petition that was launched in May 2012, urging the president to require free access to scientific journal articles from publicly funded research. (That has gathered some 64,000 signatures.)

The policy has been a long time in preparation, both at the OSTP and at federal agencies. The OSTP had asked for public views on the subject twice already, in 2009 and again in 2011. It had been charged with improving public access to research under a re-authorization of the America COMPETES Act, in December 2010. Meanwhile, both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE) have been talking to researchers and publishers over the last 18 months about new public-access and data-management policies, says Fred Dylla, the executive director of the American Institute of Physics, a publisher based in College Park, Maryland.

Federal agencies have been told to provide the OSTP with their draft policies in six months’ time.  They are allowed some flexibility, with the 12-month embargo only a “guideline” — suggesting that different embargo periods might apply in different disciplines. That is a key concern for publishers, who also want to know whether federal agencies will set up repositories of their funded work, rather like the NIH’s PubMed Central (PMC). Martin Frank, executive director at the American Physiological Society, argues that PMC has pulled viewers away from accessing articles on publisher sites, for example.

The White House statement comes a week after a bill, FASTR (‘Fair access to science and technology research’), which would require public access to papers just six months after publication, was introduced into the US Congress.

Whatever the fate of that legislation, it is now clear that US public-access policy is taking a different direction from that in the United Kingdom, where government-funded science agencies want authors to pay publishers up front to make their work free to read immediately. This immediate open-access policy involves extra money taken from science budgets to pay publishers. NSF director Subra Suresh explained to Nature that he could not justify taking money out of basic research to pay for open access at a time when demand for the agency’s funding was high.

With both the United States and Europe supporting delayed access to publications, the UK government looks increasingly isolated in its preference for immediate open access. That policy is due to come in from 1 April, but the details are not yet clear. Communication around the policy was yesterday criticized as “unacceptable” by a House of Lords inquiry.