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Comment by wdb | Hacker News Reader

I still think if the research is paid or subsidised by tax payers money it should be freely accessible. Maybe EU should do something good and make it part of the rules. All wishful thinking of course

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India decided to require all publicly funded research to make research papers and data open access[0]

[0] https://dst.gov.in/sites/default/files/STIP_Doc_1.4_Dec2020....

Our papers (US NIH funded) are required to be free and publicly available.

Of course publishers have wised up to this and now charge us money to publish. But at least anyone who finds the papers on pubmed can read them.

Pubmed also tags and indexes the articles so searching is easier.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/

Only after one year.

Why are commercial publishers even necessary anymore? They are obsolete.

That is exactly what the EU is attempting to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

The one thing that makes me wonder how nations would behave here is government-funded information generally is only available for free in the host country. BBC content is only free in Britain. ABC content is only free in Australia. Is e.g. NPR content gratis outside the US? Similarly, should NSF-backed research be freely available to the USA or the world?

(I’m in favour of the world for both science and the BBC-style content, for similar reasons really - it’s generally useful for humanity and it seems spiteful to charge some groups when you produced it with the purpose of giving it away for free in the first place).

I doubt the EU will take the lead on such a thing; the EU has a lot less tolerance for new technologies upending traditional institutions than the US. European universities basically require professors to publish in journals owned by a handful of publishing companies, which has served to cement the power of those publishers (American universities tend to be a little more open minded about new publishing models in my experience). I have heard European researchers complain that people were citing the arxiv version of their papers rather than the "official" version -- it made it harder for them to advance their careers.

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