What a farrago of lies and deceit this is! Calling Open Access a “legacy regulation” is a rather excessive bit of lying. These journals depend very much on tax dollars which is why every library that drops them destroys their bottom line and the base of individual subscribers (teaching faculty) generally don’t pay for their subscriptions themselves.
Frankly in reading this I was just shocked to see the Trump administration accused of possibly taking steps forward that the Obama administration did not/would not. We should only be paying for research once. Paying publishers repeatedly for access to somebody else’s work isn’t right in this age of competing budget priorities.
If I wanted to kill open access in today's political environment, I'd frame it as communism/socialism vs. big business/tax dollars and lobby Trump on that basis, and goad him with some anti-Obama trash talk. At first blush it sounds difficult to get Trump to care about this apparent ivory-tower issue, but in that framing, he might just care enough to act. It's a sorry state of affairs that the president is so predictably shallow.
Frankly in reading this I was just shocked to see the Trump administration accused of possibly taking steps forward that the Obama administration did not/would not. We should only be paying for research once. Paying publishers repeatedly for access to somebody else’s work isn’t right in this age of competing budget priorities.