Europe has a plan to force academic publishers to make research free to read

"The clumsily named cOAlition S (“OA” is for “open access.” The “S” for science, or solution) is a group of science funding agencies from 11 European countries. Altogether, these funders — which include UK Research and Innovation and the Research Council of Norway — spend $8.8 billion per year on grants to scientists for their research. That big financial footprint gives them some power to stipulate conditions for accepting the grant money.

Here’s what they want: By 2020, these funders will mandate that anyone who gets money from them must publish their results in a journal without a paywall. Private funders, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, already stipulate any papers that come from their grants must be open access. The cOAlition S is following their lead.

Currently, some journals make articles open access after a period of some months after publication. (Studies funded by the NIH, which spends about $30 billion on grants a year, are currently released to the public in this delayed manner.) But the cOAlition S won’t stand for this either. The studies, their declaration states, “cannot be monetized in any way.” ..."