IMAGE: Kerstin Riemer — Pixabay

Very good news: the Biden administration, through its Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), has just announced a directive and memorandum that will require all academic journals to provide free and open access, without any paywall, in readable formats that allow for use and reuse, to all research that has been funded in whole or in part through public funds.

The new policy, which replaces a previous one that allowed such publications to be kept behind a paywall for one year, will have to be fully implemented before the end of 2025, and will allow easier access to a large number of research resources in a wide variety of areas, especially for people who do not have such access through their university or research center subscriptions. According to OSTP Director Alondra Nelson:

“The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually. There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research.”

Efforts to achieve this open access to all publicly funded research began more than 30 years ago when some university libraries began highlighting the growing cost of journal subscriptions, while health science researchers protested having to pay to access research they believed could save lives. But the publishers’ lobby had succeeded in delaying definitive action until now. The previous initiative, which had managed to reduce to one year the period in which publicly funded research remained behind a paywall and, in some cases, forced the availability of articles prior to review, had been announced during the Obama administration, but Joe Biden, then vice-president, had expressed his disagreement with its limited scope.

In the first reactions to the announcement, some of these publishers have asked the agencies that fund research to increase the economic support they give to their journals in exchange for them offering free access to their research, but the purpose of the directive leaves no room for doubt: the tax payers who make research possible cannot be forced to pay again to see the results of that research.

The US directive follows similar initiatives in the European Union and other countries, but is particularly important given the research carried out with public funds in the country. It is estimated that in 2020, the various federal funds dedicated to research in all fields generated between 195,000 and 263,000 published articles, accounting for between 7% and 9% of the 2.9 million articles published worldwide that year.

Open access to science is a key issue for researchers who need access to it in order to continue developing science. Any step that brings us closer to a future that prevents institutions from keeping science behind a paywall can only be a good one.