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Comment by ratatoskrt | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, this is a Biden era policy.

> I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

Even if it originated with the previous admin, Jay Bhattacharya has decided to accelerate it. Seems like a good policy that both administrations agree on.

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.

That it survived two administrations in the current climate is a miracle to be thankful for

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)

Seems like it'll stick around too. It aligns with the current administration's goal of financially starving the bureaucracies that surround research institutions.

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.

This - Open Access has been around for a while. Battarchya is claiming he's removing the 1 year delay but I've def seen things published and openaccessed ASAP before so I'm not super familiar on the specifics.

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

That was true before this memorandum, if I remember correctly and also at least if I'm reading the 2013 and 2022 memorandi correctly. The 12 month embargo was also scheduled to be eliminated at the end of this year, JB is just moving it up 6 months.

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