The rising costs university libraries are paying to access journals have implications far beyond the ivory tower. From new cancer treatments to debates about foreign policy, new information enters the public domain through academic studies. Now libraries are having trouble affording the subscriptions.
Some grants do have this requirement. So publishers just charge you extra to make your article “open source”.
Truly, academic publishers are vile people who make the world a worse place.
Because it’s some. It’s not a universal requirement.
You obviously can’t just take away IP rights for academic research, but you can make all federal funding conditional on literally every academic paper written by any employee of the university being public domain. Schools can preserve their ownership by completely funding themselves, or they can recognize that most of them couldn’t exist without massive federal funding and that they’re not entitled to privatize the proceeds of that investment. The journals would have no capability to abuse their position because there would be no content left eligible for them to prey on.