Guarantee researchers the right to post their own papers free for anyone to read, whatever their contracts with publishers say
Steps to make it happen
- Countries decide that papers from research paid for with public money must be readable by everyone.
- Researchers can place their published papers in a public place where anyone can read them for free.
- The law says a contract with a publisher cannot take this right away.
- Universities and research centers work together to build online shelves where papers are kept.
- Rules set a short waiting time between publication in a journal and free release.
- Students and doctors in poorer countries can read new research at no cost.
- It becomes normal for people all over the world to read research results freely.
Water so far 💧 0
The proposal in detail
This proposal covers scholarly papers that come from research paid for, even in part, with public money, such as national or public research grants and the budgets of public universities and research institutes. After expert review, researchers would have the right to post the final accepted manuscript, meaning the text before the publisher polishes its look, in a nonprofit public repository run by a university, a public body, or an international group, where anyone can read it for free. This right would be set by law, and even if a publisher's contract contains a clause giving it up, that clause would have no effect. As a rule there would be no waiting period between publication in a journal and free release, and where a delay is allowed, it would have a short upper limit of a few months. Authors would not have to pay any fee to post, and because what is shared is the content of the text, not the layout the publisher created, this is kept separate from the publisher's editorial work. As exceptions, work that contains personal information, work that poses a security risk or a risk of serious misuse, and work ahead of a patent application could be delayed, as long as the reasons are given. Research books published as whole volumes are different in nature, so they would be handled separately. Funding agencies could also make use of this right a condition of their grants.
BenefitsResearch can be read around the world without new costs
The biggest effect is that researchers, doctors, teachers, students and ordinary citizens in countries and regions with little money can read the latest research for free. Knowledge that bears directly on lives and livelihoods, such as treatments for disease, farming methods and preparation for disasters, would no longer be divided by who can afford a subscription. This method does not require new journals or force authors to pay high publication fees. It only places the final manuscript of an existing paper in a repository, so it can be done at relatively low cost. For researchers too, there is a benefit: their papers are read by more people and have more chances to be cited. Because the right is protected by law, each researcher no longer has to bargain with a publisher alone, and young researchers in weak positions and researchers in developing countries can share their work in the same way. In addition, when papers are kept together in a form anyone can read, it becomes easier to check and reuse research, and science as a whole is expected to move faster. It is also worth noting that people who make policy and reporters can check the evidence more easily.
DrawbacksJournals may lose income, and the quality of review and editing may suffer
What opponents worry about most is that publishers' income would fall and the system that supports scholarly journals would itself grow weaker. If papers can be read for free, libraries may begin to cancel their subscriptions. Publishers pay for the less visible work of arranging peer review, editing, correcting errors and preserving papers over the long term with subscription fees, and if that income shrinks, quality could drop, and small specialist journals run by academic societies might not be able to continue. If publishers fight back by raising publication fees, or by making it harder to accept papers from researchers in countries where this right is guaranteed, researchers could end up worse off. There is also the criticism that using the law to cancel a contract that both sides agreed to is a strong intrusion on freedom of contract. When the final manuscript and the journal's version circulate side by side, readers may not know which is the official one, and there is a worry that versions without later corrections will be used. Who will pay to run the repositories safely over the long term, and how to coordinate when each country's system is different, also remain problems to be solved.
Learn the background
Most scholarly papers appear in journals that charge high subscription fees to read. These fees have kept rising for a long time. Even university libraries in rich countries find it hard to carry every journal, and universities and hospitals in places with little money, and ordinary citizens, are even further from the latest research. Much research is paid for with taxes, and researchers do most of the reviewing almost for free, yet public institutions must pay again to read the results. People have long questioned this arrangement. In response, a system spread in which authors pay a fee to make their papers free to read, but those fees are often high, and this has created a new gap: researchers with little money find it harder to publish. When infectious disease spread around the world, many studies were made free for a time, which showed again how valuable it is for knowledge to flow freely. Some countries are moving to give authors a legal right to share their own papers, but the systems differ from country to country, and in practice the outcome still depends on who has the stronger hand in the contract with the publisher.
Choose them ready to accept their drawbacks too (up to 5)
It helps pay for the server and the AI's planting
This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-15d) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes