From the website: http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ict_platform.html Neuroinformatics Platform, Brain Simulation Platform, Medical Informatics Platform

Extremely useful platforms that should be open. In addition to which I agree with you that they should allow access to their papers.

According to the work plan (not public as far as I know), all the platforms will be open to researchers not just from Europe but from anywhere in the world.

Google Scholar lists about 855 papers mentioning the term "blue brain project", the Human Brain Project's predecessor:

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=%22blue+brain+project%22&...

And even though the project has just launched, there are already about 1,980 papers mentioning the term "human brain project":

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=%22human+brain+project%22...

The "Human Brain Project" was also an NIH funding initiative in the 1990s, which was hugely influential in kickstarting the field of neuroinformatics (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroinformatics)

Ah, thanks I didn't know about that.

Okay, so to correct my earlier comment to (hopefully) exclude the earlier project, Google Scholar shows about 105 results for "human brain project" in 2012-2013.

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=%22human+brain+project%22...

'already'? This has been going since 1989, that's a funny definition of already that you are using!

Yes, but one day they will have - hopefully - results. And a commitment to publish in open access journals should have been part and parcel of a funding round like this. A billion is not exactly pocket change.

Henry Markram, the coordinator of the Human Brain Project, is also one of the founders of Frontiers (http://frontiersin.org), a scientist-led, open-access publisher, so I think it's fair to say there is already a strong commitment to open access publishing within the project.

The EU already encourages open access for FP7 (the current funding programme) and it will become even better for the new one called Horizon2020 starting next year. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/european-commission-emb...

Encouraging is not mandating though. But they're definitely on the right path, now they need to see it through.

For some projects it is already mandated in the grant agreement. I've heard that this will be extended to all project for Horizon 2020. I am also under the impression, that the EU protects researchers who post the full version of their papers on their websites even when the publisher does not permit it. I could be wrong on the latter.

Certainly, there is always room for improvement.