China has officially joined the international push to make research papers free to read. On 15 May, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), one of the country’s major basic-science funding (26) , and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which funds and conducts research at more than 100 institutions, announced that researchers they support should (27) their papers into online repositories and make them publicly (28) within 12 months of publication. The policies, which (29) the same day they were announced, are similar to the mandate set by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Xiaolin Zhang, director of the National Science Library at the CAS in Beijing, says that another major research-funding agency, the national (30) of science and technology, is also researching open-access policies. He expects that its policy will take a similar line. The announcements could see tens or even hundreds of thousands more papers made open access. Zhang says that, (31) data from the Science Citation Index (SCI. database maintained by Thomson Reuters, Chinese research output has (32) from 48,000 articles in 2003, to more than 186,000 articles in 2012. Of those, more than 100,000 involved some funding from the NSFC, says its president, Wei Yang. And CAS scientists published more than 18,000 SCI articles in 2012, and more than 12,000 articles in (33) Chinese journals, says Zhang. Both agencies plan to (34) more detailed guidelines on implementation. (35) , the NSFC will establish a repository into which researchers must upload papers, possibly modelled after the NIH’s PubMed Central.