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Comment by kanzure | Hacker News Reader

This is a fantastic development. What are the chances of any of this applying retroactively to papers that are already published?

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In the case of FASTR, I don't think there's anything in there about it being retroactive. Certainly there's not for the existing NIH policy. In the case of the Whitehouse Directive, I suppose individual agencies could decide to adopt a retroactive policy. But I don't think such a policy is being prescribed.

Thank you. The reason I ask is because many of the articles that I am currently reading or need to read are those that were published prior to the existence of FASTR, in particular recent papers published between, say, the 1920s and 2010s. In due time, these articles that are locked away will be less referenced, but in the mean time I am left scratching my head... will we just try to forget that this terrible plague ever happened to science, and re-publish as much as possible?

>I suppose individual agencies could decide to adopt a retroactive policy.

I don't think they could. If they've already signed a contract to fund a project, they can't just decide to change the rules. This will only count going forward.

The chances are zero. There is no way for the government to retroactively change the terms and conditions of contracts and grants that were executed long ago.

That's not accurate, they could grant themselves a license to the copyright under eminent domain.

Or just retroactively reduce the lengths of copyright terms. After all, they retroactively increase the lengths of those terms all the time, so why can they not reduce them as well? The constitution explicitly requires copyrights to expire, but makes no specific mention of what the minimum or maximum terms are.

California just enacted a massive retroactive tax. If they want to, they will do what they want.

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/01/15/california-t...

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/02/21/the-california-tax-th...

Then some billionaires need to buy Elvesier et al and do so. That for my money, would be one of the best things to happen to science as the result of profit.

I'm not sure if this is a fantastic development. Placing a copy of the journal article on the agency website is cheap, but the burden of opening the data is going to be costly. This may cut funds available for subsequent research due to reallocation of the funds to opening the research to the public.

The gray area here is 1996 up to the present. Anything before that has not been licensed to publishers if that was not explicitly arranged.

After 1996 you could presumably take it as read that digital rights were included when you transferred copyrights.

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