Trump could mandate free access to federally funded research papers
Found on Ars Technica on Saturday, 28 December 2019
The Trump White House is rumored to be working on a beefed-up open access mandate. The potential executive order would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon as they are published.
Supporters of the open access model question how much value traditional scientific publishers actually add. The peer-review process is typically carried out by working scientists on a volunteer basis. Meanwhile, you'd expect the Internet to reduce the costs of distributing scientific journals.
Paid by the public, free to the public. It's simple. If scientific magazines want research papers they can demand money for, they just should fund the research for those.