Trump’s administration may address the outrageous academic publishing market.

"In December, in the midst of the political wrangling associated with President Trump’s impeachment, a news report gave me hope. According to it, Trump’s administration was working on an executive order that would require publishers to grant immediate free access to all journal articles that result from federally funded research. Predictably, the publication industry rapidly issued a scathing critique of the idea, signed by 140 publishers and academic societies. Although the Trump administration is widely viewed to be anti-science, it would be a mistake to interpret the presence of academic societies on this letter as representing the interests of science writ large. Within two days of the industry letter, a coalition representing 210 academic and research libraries wrote an open letter to the White House supporting changing federal policy in exactly the way the executive order is rumored to do. Indeed, there have long been calls for opening access to research results. This is an area where U.S. lags behind Europe in policy and Latin America in development of open access journals and databases.

In an era when most presidential actions are viewed primarily through partisan lenses, it is worth taking a step back and considering why this rumored proposal elicited a polarized response, but one that did not fall along partisan lines. A lot of money is at stake. But so too are the essences of scientific communication and scientific self-governance...."