Submission to the White House OSTP · Peter Suber

"As a result of the OSTP memorandum of February 2013, the largest federal research-funding agencies now require OA to research articles rising from their grants. But in every case they allow embargoes before those works must become OA. The 2013 memorandum itself recommends 12 months as the default embargo.

I'm writing to urge OSTP to reduce and ultimately eliminate these embargoes. They deliberately slow public access to publicly-funded research. In this way, they hinder researchers, research institutions, and research itself. For the same reasons, they hurt taxpayers who funded the research and for whom federal policy should maximize the public benefits of publicly-funded research. 

These embargoes were created in response to lobbying requests from publishers. In that sense, they benefit a private interest at the expense of the public interest. Yet to this day there is no evidence that eliminating embargoes would hurt publishers...."