[throwawaygh]

I'm a proponent of affordable open access. I think that work produced using even a penny of federal grant money should only be published in open access venues where publication fees (including eg mandatory conference attendance) are capped at $500. (In particular, these means a permanent remote attendance option at all CS conference... no more "good work doesn't get published because the author is at a community college and can't afford a one week European beach resort vacation".)

The opinion expressed in the parent comment is (perhaps unwittingly) extreme and doesn't even solve the problem.

First, the "no paywalls" solution does not even solve the problem! What happens in practice is that publishers shift the cost from the reader to the author by charging MASSIVE open access fees to publish. The taxpayer gets screwed by the publisher on the front-end instead of the back-end. Any solution needs hard upper limits on the cost of publishing.

Second, open access requirements should be scoped to work paid for with public funds. Professors should be allowed to write books and publish them through the university press as long as they do the work on their own time (or the university's time). Graduate students should be allowed to do off-hours consulting work to make ends meet during their PhD studies.