MENA Newswire, CANBERRA: Australia on Monday launched a new “Open Science Policy” for publicly funded health and medical research, setting requirements for immediate open access to research papers and broader expectations for sharing data, methods, software and code under the country’s major medical research funding programs.
The joint policy is issued by the Australian Government’s Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, which administers the Medical Research Future Fund, and the National Health and Medical Research Council. It applies to MRFF grant opportunities that open from Jan. 1, 2026, with limited exemptions determined in specific grant opportunity guidelines, and requires NHMRC grant holders to comply from Feb. 2, 2026.
Under the framework, at least one version of any research paper arising from NHMRC and or MRFF funding must be openly accessible immediately at the time of first online publication, with no embargo period. The policy also requires publication under a Creative Commons Attribution, or CC BY, licence and says metadata for research papers should be made open access in an institutional repository as soon as possible and no later than three months after first online publication.
The policy sets out compliance options that include publishing an open access version of record in a journal, depositing an author accepted manuscript in a repository under rights retention with a CC BY licence, or making a preprint openly available in a recognised publicly accessible archive or preprint server. The policy notes that file sharing and social networking platforms are not acceptable repositories for compliance because they may not provide appropriate long term storage, curation or licensing support.
Immediate access and reuse rules
Researchers are required to take reasonable steps to share research data and associated metadata using an “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” approach and in line with FAIR and CARE principles, which focus on making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable while recognising collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. Research papers funded by NHMRC and or MRFF must include a data availability statement, and conditions for access are to be made clear in the metadata of any deposited dataset.
The policy adds time specific requirements for public health emergencies, stating that relevant data and associated metadata must be deposited in a trusted repository once quality is appropriately assured, and at most within one month of acquisition. Where data is derived from human participants, the policy says sharing must comply with consent terms and any ethics committee requirements. It also encourages researchers to plan for management and sharing of outputs early, including through formal data management plans.
Clinical trials and Indigenous governance
For clinical trials, the policy requires registration in the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry or an equivalent WHO accredited registry before recruitment of the first participant, and says the trial registration ID must be included in reports to funders and in trial materials. It expects timely sharing of clinical trial results, ideally within 12 months of primary study completion, including through open access publication and or summary results reporting in a registry. It also strongly encourages trial data to be described in Health Data Australia, a discovery and request service.
The policy includes provisions for research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities, calling for dedicated governance and stewardship and actions that consider ownership, management, access and distribution of research results and outputs. It says researchers should recognise and protect Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and allows a more restrictive Creative Commons licence in some cases, including CC BY-ND, as an exception to the otherwise mandatory CC BY approach for research papers.
Across outputs, the policy requires clear acknowledgement of NHMRC and or MRFF funding and inclusion of unique grant identification numbers, and it promotes the use of persistent identifiers such as DOIs for papers and ORCID identifiers for researchers. It also addresses intellectual property and commercial in confidence circumstances, advising consultation with commercialisation and IP experts and documentation of any restrictions in required reporting where sharing could risk business or commercialisation prospects.