Trump could mandate free access to federally funded research papers

Enlarge / Donald Trump. (credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

The Trump White House is rumored to be working on a beefed-up open access mandate. The potential executive order would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon as they are published. That would supersede a 2013 rule issued by the Obama White House that required federally funded papers to become freely available one year after publication.

The White House hasn't actually announced the new policy yet, but the rumors were enough to get the attention of scientific publishers. Last week more than 100 publishing organizations signed a letter calling on the Trump administration to scrap the proposal.

The letter warned that an open access mandate would "jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles." Without the ability to charge the public for articles, scientific journals would have to pass those costs on to researchers or taxpayers, the letter warns.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments