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This is seriously the worry people have? Scribd hosts documents for free. Academia.edu hosts documents for free and in fact ENCOURAGES academics to post papers there. If a website is willing to host the papers for free versus having a system where we spend millions on research so that journals can put it behind their paywall I feel like the future has written itself already.

From the petition:

"Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet"

I'm just pointing out that requiring it to be posted on the internet requires someone to host it.

(Shrug) Any research worth paying for is going to cost a million times more than hosting the resulting documents. I don't follow you.

The public? The public has just stumped up the cash for the research, so adding the cost of hosting the resulting papers for perpetuity would be a negligible addition to the original grant.

Hosting fees by who?

Open Access journals like PLoS are usually paid by the institute who wants to publish, it costs around $2000-$3000 per paper. In a lot of cases, this cost is carried by a OA-policy or a university's grant for OA-related costs.

If this policy is successful, I guess the tax-payer will carry these costs.