[tfgg]

All (afaik) UK research councils now have an Open Access mandate. It's a bit of a mess, though, since they keep changing how/who's going to pay for it, and what level of Open Access they mandate. Practically, for physicists, this just means uploading your paper to arXiv.

Open Access is a more subtle economic argument than I think many people here are admitting, and you have to recognise the value-added that journals provide. There are experiments out there (e.g. post-publication peer review, free-floating editorial boards) trying to challenge the journal model, but I'm not going to presuppose that they're going to be more successful than pay-for OA journals.