Starting July 1, academic publishers can't paywall NIH-funded research

That's not the only funding model. Many industry standards are free to access, for example HL7 FHIR. Their funding model is largely organizational membership fees, plus some additional charges for meeting attendance and training courses. This works fine. Several federal regulations mandate the use of HL7 standards for healthcare interoperability.

> The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).

The government funds libraries and the grants for NIH research. It's already in the business of funding both sorts of institutions. Why, then, shouldn't it also simply self-publish results for the research it paid for?

The winners would be basically everyone, the losers' publishers. Publishing is already just a parasitic artifact of over-privatization of what should be government ran systems.

It isn't as if publishing has a large cost in general. In fact, the government already runs a huge publishing operation in the form of PACER. Further, anyone taking grant money is already heavily working with the government to convince it to fund them.

I should add that India does this for some IEC documents and other standards under open information acts.

While you're at it, make textbooks free. And movies. And games. Who is going to pay for standards development? How will it maintain a stable funding mechanism? I refer you to recent developments with the US government.

FYI, you can view the NEC for free. You have to have an account and it’s a janky web view of a PDF, which is suboptimal, but it is free.

Isn't the main cost on the participants in the consortium anyway? I.e. effort amd time.

The standards that already exist? Is there some special meaning of "drafted" here?

what do you mean exactly? I was suprised how with grobid many of at least the arXiv papers are easily converted to xml for better processing than PDF.

Most of the papers are constructed from their latex sources so there's an easy way to undo it i guess.

https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid

I've recently had this problem where the important information (number of study participants, and how many were filtered out during which step) were only encoded in figures, not in the text. Maddening.

I specifically said journals subscription fees support peer review infrastructure. Yes peer reviewers are unpaid but peer review also would not exist in anything resembling its current form in the absence of journal staff moving papers through the peer review system. Associate/deputy editors are unpaid but the main editor of the journal is often paid and does provide scientific oversight and review, particularly at the margin of acceptance/rejection. The main editor of course is also responsible for recruiting associate editors who in turn are responsible for finding appropriate peer reviewers, so having a good editor who can recruit and maintain quality deputy/associate editors is key. Some journals even have staff scientific reviewers which act as a check on the occasional oversights of unpaid peer review.

Moving forward the removal of the embargo. But my point is that access to federally funded science was free prior to anyone coming up with a plan to remove the embargo. You just needed to wait up to a year before a paper was put on pubmed central. This removal of the embargo is hardly a meaningful change in terms of access but one that erodes the institutions that ensure peer review happens. It is easy to say peer review is largely based on volunteers, but if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now. At least you can put peer reviewer on your academic CV. The paid journal staff do much less glamorous work but still serve a role in keeping peer review running.

Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.

Just saying, sci-hub (and libgen) has turned off in my country (Netherlands). Like, they block access at an ISP level — and all ISPs and phone companies are blocking it. I imagine there might be a measurable decline in academic productivity, at that point.

Anyway, the warning is: liberal free countries can stop these things if they want to.

So… it’s up to us the public. Why can’t university libraries make their books and journals properly accessible in a digital format, like libgen and sci-hub? Why can’t they make their whole collection RAG retrivable, for that matter?

What goes to government should benefit the people, not the mythical entity

you'd be surprised at how many policies survived two administrations. the real big one (unless I'm missing something or there have been CIA covert ops) is "not invading any new countries" (yemen conflict started under obama)

The difference is that while indirect costs are critical to research in most cases, journals are the poster child when it comes to skimming research funding.

They provide little to no real value beyond a CV trophy and only carry out the bare minimum to coordinate peer review. Their largest impact is siphoning tens of thousands of dollars from labs, and millions from cash-strapped university libraries.

Even if the current administration wasn't attacking university funding, the publishing system is in desperate need of reform.

> It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.

Though arguably orthogonal with their goal of financially starving the research institutions, too.

Consider that a lot of NIH research funding has already been cut.

They effectively ended research they didn't want to release, wasting funding already provided, while counting it as wasteful spending.

The change is that now all NIH-funded research must be open access.

Typing "gender" in a phrase such as "sexual gender", "age and gender" works.

> try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box

Compared to their other actions of censorship, this is such a small thing, but for some reason this in particular makes me distressed. Possibly because it shows how paranoid they are about letting out any information that goes against their narrative; that they're willing to do stupid, reckless things to control the narrative; that they enforce obedience to their ideology at all levels. It just seems like the entrance to a dark future.

It feels like they're trying to rewrite history... Which is a term I searched the Internet for, and funnily enough the first result was a blog post from the current White House administration. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/rest... (My other worry is that everything they accuse of others is a projection of their own intentions onto others. This seems less absurd every passing day. Otherwise this would be laughable.) So I guess the White House is explicit in they they're rewriting history to the True history. Thank you so much. Finally, we can be united under ONE Nation, ONE Truth, and ONE God. Sorry, I got a bit over-excited there.

For time travelers: searching for "gender" just directs you back to nih.gov, instead of directing you to the search results page.

I've found so far: 'gender', 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion', as expected. Not: 'equality', 'socioeconomic', 'minority', 'ableism'.

Spanish is uncensored: Not censored: 'diversidad', 'equidad', 'genero' Censored: 'inclusion' (ha, same word as in english, duh) (Also 'inclusión', surprisingly)

It really doesn't seem to be a broad sweeping thing, mostly just 'DEI' terms forwarded in apache or something, which makes sense. That gender is included seems to be an outlier. (Though would be curious to see if you found any others)

Very interestingly, I tried to write "gender" and mistakenly wrote "gendea". The search engine, trying to be helpful, gave me: "No results found for 'gendea'. Showing results for gender"

And voilà, I just got 1666 (heh) results free from the censors!