[arcanus]

I could not agree more: this is a good thing. Studies funded by public money should be freely available by default. This is a great decision and I hope major funding agencies in the USA follow this example.

As a practicing scientist, I ostensibly have access to a rich variety of journals from my employer. However, I've found journal access to be difficult during WFH/COVID. My default is to look for an open access paper, before jumping to the digital library. I've also had a few cases where the digital access seemed not to be working, which only put up barriers to my work.

[laurent92]

The supposed advantage of commercial archiving is duration, where as self-hosted tends to depend on the author; But we could create solutions where, if works are being used by clients (hospitals, research), the client would be in charge of automatically downloading all the dependencies. Like a Maven repository, but with P2P resharing.

In similar vein, software used by public institutions should be required to be made open-source. Open source is already the VIIth marvel of humanity, and needs consolidation.