White House requires immediate public access to all U.S.-funded research papers by 2025

A decadeslong battle over how best to provide public access to the fruits of research funded by the U.S. government has taken a major turn. President Joe Biden’s administration announced yesterday that, by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published. Data underlying those publications must also be made freely available “without delay.” Many details of the new policy , including exactly how the government will fund immediate public access, remain to be decided. But it significantly reshapes and expands existing—and fiercely contested— U.S. access rules that have been in place since 2013 . Most notably, the White House has substantially weakened , but not formally eliminated, the ability of journals to keep final versions of federally funded papers behind a subscription paywall for up to 1 year. Many commercial publishers and nonprofit scientific societies have long fought to maintain that 1-year embargo, saying it is critical to protecting subscription revenues that cover editing and production costs and fund society activities. But critics of paywalls argue that they obstruct the free flow of information, have enabled price gouging by some publishers, and force U.S. taxpayers to “pay twice”—once to fund the research and again to see the results. Since the late 1990s, the cr...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research