European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)
I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free.  The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication.  Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that.  But for work that was previously published?  It's rightly owned by the publishers.<p>Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article.  If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake.  They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version.  This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version).  When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice.  That final product does and should belong to them.<p>It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available.  But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years.  You can't just "undo" that.  And they're still doing it today.  If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).