Following similar moves by Britain and the European Union, the US government has decided that the results of publicly funded scientific research must be made freely available on the Internet within one year of their first publication.
The decision comes after pressure from scientific and other organizations, which consider it unreasonable that universities should have to pay to have access to studies funded by taxpayers.
More than 65,000 people had also signed a petition to the White House demanding free access to federal studies.
However, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy was quick to clarify that it had taken into account the arguments of the scientific publishing industry, in order to remain viable and continue to advance scientific knowledge. Thus, federally funded studies will become freely accessible at least 12 months after their initial publication in subscription journals, a period of time that many scientists have called excessively long.
The US government's decision comes less than a year after Harvard announced it would stop paying for expensive scientific reviews and urge its students to opt for open access reviews. The main reason for the decision was the cost of subscriptions, which amounted to $3.5 million a year.
A few weeks later, in June 2012, a report on behalf of the British government concluded that open access reviews should become “the primary means of publishing research.”
A month later, the European Commission announced that EU-funded scientific work should be freely available to everyone.
"Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research and demand immediate access to research data," Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, said at the time.
Major scientific publications, such as Nature and Science and the journal Cell, derive most of their revenue from subscriptions. Publishers argue that quality does not come cheap, given that top publications require large staffs and large databases.
The largest company in the sector is the Dutch Elsevier, which publishes 2,000 journals (Cell, The Lancet, Gray's Anatomy) and employs 7,000 people. According to Reuters, Elsevier had revenue of 2.1 billion pounds last year and profits of 768 million, with a profit margin of 37%.
In the last decade, however, open access journals, such as the American PLoS and the British Biomed Central, have become increasingly popular, which are freely available on the Internet and cover their operating costs by charging a small fee for the publication of each study.
