Finally some sense from the US government. According to this White House news release, research funded by the government must be available to the public without cost or delay. In particular, the current policy of a one year embargo on published research will be discontinued. Of course, being the government, the new policy will not be fully in force until 2026.
As I’ve written many times, it’s immoral to ask the American public to pay for research and then lock up the results of that research behind a paywall. Worse, subscriptions to a single journal can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year.
The “normal” citizen will have no interest in access to these journals of course but there are plenty of people with the ability and interest to read and use the research but who don’t have access to a university library or other source of the journals. And, of course, researchers from third world countries who are fully capable of using and extending the research have no access at all,
The completely normalized, but illegal, solution is sites like Sci-Hub that curate the papers and make them available for free. This infuriates the publishers whose copyrights are being violated but most of the scientific community—fed up with the publishers’ greed and refusal to remedy the situation—seem fine with Sci-Hub and other pirate sites.
Added before publication
Here’s a couple more articles on the change. One from Science and the other from Ars Technica. These articles looks briefly at some of the consequences of the new rule.