The term accessibility in this context refers to the collective efforts by institutions, organisations and individuals to managing research outputs and infrastructure, including information infrastructure, so that they are discoverable, accessible and shareable, in order to improve the quality of research outcomes, reduce duplication and better manage research activities and reporting.
The Accessibility Framework is intended to provide a strategic framework to improve access to research information, outputs and infrastructure. It will be an agreed system-wide approach for managing research outputs and infrastructure so that they are discoverable, accessible and shareable, in order to improve the quality of research outcomes, reduce duplication and better manage research activities and reporting.
The Government is keen to ensure that, through the establishment and linkage of electronic digital repositories, national scholarly output and research data derived from Australian Government funding will be available to researchers and the wider community, subject to agreed ways to safeguard the privacy of participants and the protection of confidential information and commercially sensitive data.
The Framework will embrace a range of e-Research environments that are emerging from the changing innovative practices of scientists and scholars in all disciplines. It will be largely based on existing investments in research infrastructure, which are laying the foundations for e-research in which advanced computational, collaborative data acquisition and management services are available to researchers through high-performance networks.
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For researchers and students the Accessibility Framework will provide improved access to digital repositories and research facilities and correspondingly improved mechanisms for dissemination of their research outputs. With the adoption of international standards there will be improved capacity to collaborate domestically and internationally.
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For universities and publicly funded research agencies the Framework will provide opportunities for collaboration to assist with the upgrade of e-business systems already in train to better manage research activities and reporting, provide a consistent accountability framework and provide robust data to support arguments for research funding.
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For government, the Accessibility Framework will provide an improved mechanism for collection of research indicators, provide an opportunity to achieve greater consistency in the operation of research funding agencies and outline a clear statement of the obligations in the public interest on NCRIS funding recipients.
Issues that the Framework will need to address include:
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common standards and protocols for storing, curating, cataloguing and disseminating information;
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technological infrastructure capable of supporting rapid access to information and facilities
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regulatory environment that both enables and encourages the population of repositories and information sharing
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people skills development and culture change are addressed.
Much of the value of research accrues through effective dissemination of research outcomes, leading to greater societal understanding or take up of the results. One of the best ways to make research outcomes as accessible as possible is to expose the research output through an open access institutional repositories.
Australian universities and institutes have been given the substantial funding of $12 million under the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC) for projects to build the technical information infrastructure to support the creation, dissemination of and access to knowledge, the use of digital assets and their management. The aim is to improve Australia's abilities to take part and lead in national and international research. Four major projects funded under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) are underway, including:
The drive to maximise the availability of national scholarly output and research data derived from Australian Government funding to researchers and the wider community is not confined to Australia. It has been international.
The Ministerial meeting of the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy 
, 29-30 January 2004, chaired by Mr Peter McGauran, then-Australian Minister for Science, adopted a final communique pointing out that open access and sharing provides greater returns to the public investment in research. A OECD working group has since been exploring commonly agreed Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding, taking into account possible restrictions related to security, property rights and privacy.
The USA and UK have approached the government role from two different approaches to address the accessibility of research information derived from public funding.
The US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee approved recommendation in July 2004 that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to put a condition on its research grants requiring all articles based on NIH-funded research would be deposited in a central repository (PubMed Central) by authors.
The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has recommended all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It has also recommended that Research Councils and other Government Funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way. It has also recommended that the UK government should provide funds for all UK universities to launch open access (OA) institutional research repositories . The UK Government has responded to the House recommendations. The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Open Society Institute have published a report provides a history of the open access movement and arguments for and against it.
The international research communities have increasingly supported the move to open access solutions to maximise their research impact by maximising research access on the basis of mutually beneficial arrangements. For example, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was released by German research councils and universities.
In Italy, 32 rectors of Italian universities released the Messina Declaration and confirmed their adherence to the principles of the Berlin Declaration. This was followed by Austrian Rectors' Conference also signing the Berlin Declaration on 11th November 2003. Delegates to the Russian National Library conference on 28th October 2003 released the St Petersburg Declaration, laying down the clear principle that publicly funded research should be made publicly available.