This makes me happy. It was such an obvious right thing to do, but it took so long to come to fruition.
Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.
At the same time, NIH just announced that all grants involving foreign researcher are shut.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1...
>Effective with the date of this notice and until the details of the new foreign collaboration award structure are released, NIH will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities (new, renewal or non-competing continuation), that include a subaward to a foreign entity.
No more collaborations for US researchers.
This is good though it's not clear whether these papers will appear in the PMC Open Access subset (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/) and be bulk downloadable.
I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib
My reading of this press release is that they are just removing the 12 month embargo period before the already mandated free-access (untypeset) versions of grant-supported manuscripts can go on pubmed central. The prior policy of a 12 month embargo period allowed publishers to have a small value add over the free version. This value add justifies subscription fees which support, among other things, infrastructure necessary to support peer review and possibly some in-house staff scientific editing and review. I do wonder whether it is worth it to make all papers available immediately if indirectly may make peer review even less supported than it is now.
As someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...
If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results.
I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost.
They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.
Have the new generations forgotten how to praise an accomplishment even when it was realized by their enemy. “Give the devil his due”. Partisan myopia has reached an intellectually crippling height in the US. As a scientist who has worked in academia for decades, there is no equivocation in me about praising this move. So many times has my progress in research be speed-bumped by a paywall. Rejoice in the purple between red and blue.
I didn’t realize the NIH still existed. I thought Musk fired all the government scientists and researchers.
This was already in the works pre-Trump, they just sped up the timeline by half a year:
> The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.
This is an absolute win. Publicly funded research should never be behind a pay wall.
yeah this is finally the way it should be. always wondered why stuff paid for by taxes got stashed behind paywalls for so long. feels like common sense, even if it took forever
Just to be clear, this is a Biden era policy.
How about NIH funded drugs, can they be "paywall-ed" ?
I guess the punchline is the NIH won't be funding research then either?
...if there's any left: