National Academies Press Makes All PDF Books Free to Download

As long as the work is a result of taxpayer's money, they SHOULD make it free for the public's access.

Maaaaan.... I submitted that within hours of the announcement. And got nuttin! (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616450). It's a good program. More people should poke around that collection.

NAP has long been a leader in on-line publishing.

Anybody familiar with NAP's business model?

It's not a business, it's the publishing arm of the National Academy of Science, which was chartered to "investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science" by the US Congress and signed into law by President Lincoln in 1863. The idea was the government needed an academy of experts to advise law makers on matters of science.

http://www.nationalacademies.org/about/whoweare.html

Published through the Government Printing Office (GPO), too, I believe. So it's basically, publicly funded research is now entirely publicly available.