Trump could mandate free access to federally funded research papers

guest · Dec 29, 2019

Trump could mandate free access to federally funded research papers
Publishers warn the change could "jeopardize the IP of American organizations."
December 27, 2019
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...an-on-paywalls-for-federally-funded-research/

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.

The White House hasn't actually announced the new policy yet, but the rumors were enough to get the attention of scientific publishers. Last week more than 100 publishing organizations signed a letter calling on the Trump administration to scrap the proposal.
The letter warned that an open access mandate would "jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles."

There is undoubtedly some truth to that—many open access journals charge fees to authors. These fees range widely—from a few hundred dollars to several thousand.
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The letter opposing a federal open access mandate was not only signed by major commercial publishers like Elsevier and Wiley but also by a number of academic, medical, and other professional societies. Many of these organizations run their own journals and would lose some revenue from an open access mandate.

"Research funded by taxpayers should not be locked behind a paywall," one long-time ACM member tweeted.
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Comment
[...] and it seems increasingly clear that the damage done to the actual end by paywalling everything is greater than the value added by the outfits that combine unpaid reviewer labor with taxpayer funded researcher output and maybe a house stylesheet.

Comment
If the research is being publicly funded, then the IP generated by that research should belong to the public. Simple as that.

Still, saying it will "jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles" makes no sense, since the articles aren't patents and they are accessible to the public, provided they pay.
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