The White House on Thursday directed health and science agencies to make federally funded studies immediately available to the public after publication, a move that open-access advocates have long pressed for but one that threatens to upend the business models of scientific journals.
The guidance from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy effectively ushers in a sea change in the publishing industry, which currently places many federally funded research papers behind a paywall for 12 months.
While President Biden — and former President Trump before him — had long pledged to open access to federally funded research, the publishing lobby has argued doing so could spell the demise of scientific journals reliant on significant subscription fees to access embargoed papers.
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