I’m not sure how I feel about this. On one hand this is great for transparency and progress but this is also paid for by US taxpayers so why should scientist/people outside of the US benefit?
What is access like now, anyone can pay to access regardless of citizenship? If so, then it would seem most US citizens are paying twice to access the research anyways - the same deal as foreign countries. If this makes it free for everyone it's not really changing (most) anyone's relative cost - assuming I'm correct on the first point.
It’s not like the taxpayer was getting any monetary benefit from publishing with Elsevier. A private company was making money, not the scientist or government.
Published research is accessible today by paying subscriptions to journals. The journals are privately owned. The end result is that today your tax $$ are going to enrich publishing companies many of which are not US companies either.
This way everyone benefits. There is no way of keeping the access embargoed to US citizens or tax payers. But that wasn't happening in the current model anyway.
There is no such thing as a published scientific journal available to only one country.
Nobody is saying that the government can't fund private research (as it surely does in the context of security, defense, etc). But that if research is _published_, it ought to be open access rather than behind a paywall.