NIH had originally proposed making this mandatory years ago. The date got pushed back (possibly more than once). The first "open access" mandate was over a decade ago but exceptions were carved out, and there were also some very long grants that were already funded that were exempt from new regulations. This is just the latest - and hopefully last - step.

The foot dragging came more from the journals than anything. It wouldn't be that hard for Nature, Science, Cell, and the rest of the most prestigious journals to just make all the new articles available for all; they still make plenty of money on review charges, page fees, subscription fees, and fees charged to people who don't reside in the USA. They just kept finding excuses and their prestige kept people from fighting back harder.

I have never met a scientist who earned a nickel off of journal paper royalties; I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure no such thing exists. I've worked with people who have published in Nature and Science and they never mentioned ever getting money back for their papers; I was a co-author on a paper in PNAS and neither I nor anyone else on the paper received any money from that either.

The big journals exist primarily because they have existed for so long. As I mentioned elsewhere, the academic journals aren't much different from health insurance companies; nobody likes them but they are so entrenched in our system that it's impossible to exist without them. Similarly both are parasites and neither are that different from many Ponzi schemes.

I will concede the journals do have some costs - just not anywhere near what they take in. They do need to store digital information - in some cases papers can have many gigs of data that needs to be stored for quite some time - and the archives of some of these journals now goes back well over 100 years. Arguably though the real racket to the whole system is in the review process itself; the reviewers are all volunteers and some of the editors are as well. The journals have almost no expense until the final article is accepted, and yet the scientists are paying money to them up front without a guarantee of publication.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic there or not, but publication charges are significant for the most prestigious journals. Even the journals that don't have print editions charge hundred of dollars (or more) for publication fees - and many of the print journals are also supported by advertising.

Academic publishing is similar to health insurance. Nobody likes it - except for the people making money off of it - but there is no other option so we put up with it.

I spent a lot of time in academia. I did undergrad and post-undergrad research. I was a grad student for far too long working on my PhD. I was a post-doc for several years after that, and a research associate after that. I know how the sausage is made.

You'll be hard pressed to find a researcher who favors paywalls. The problem is many of the most prestigious journals use them. This leads to a chicken-and-egg problem for researchers, as they either get their best work in the paywalled journals - where it gets read by more people - or they put it into less prestigious journals that are not paywalled. For years there was no choice; it was paywalled or less read.

The new regulation says that the previously paywalled journals have to make an open access option available for NIH funded research. This is a great thing. The publishers will still get publication fees, but they can't force readers to pay additional fees. Whether journals should be so expensive to publish in - and subscribe to - is another question, but at least readers will have access to more published work at no direct cost.

But make no mistake about it. The paywalls existed to generate revenue for the journals, the scientists themselves never favored them. As someone who spent quite a bit of time at a smaller research university (with fewer journal subscriptions available through our library) I know the frustration of not being able to get some journal articles due to paywalls.

You should look up "basic science", which I presume is not the acronym you were after with "BS". There is a lot of important basic science research that is funded by the NIH that gets spun - intentionally or otherwise - into things that it isn't. There is a lot that we don't know about fundamental molecular biology that we are funding research on that will pay dividends later but might seem obtuse right now.

Another great example is transgenomic - not transgendered - animal models. Whether the Trump Administration made that misstatement intentionally or just ignorantly is open to discussion, but the value of the work is not. We learn a lot by doing genomic work in mice; work that leads to better understanding and treatment for human diseases.

You couldn't be more wrong on that if you tried. If scientists had work they didn't want people to know about why would they publish it at all? To get a publication in anywhere it has to go through peer review, which means more people read it and know about it. If you had awful results that you didn't want to tell anyone about then wouldn't you just not even submit it to a journal at all?

Maybe the ballot was different in your state, but here "Cheaper groceries" were not running for POTUS. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were running for POTUS. There were a few third party candidates on our ballot as well but none were called "Cheaper groceries"; hence nearly everyone who cast a ballot voted for Trump or Harris.

To give credit to the folks who always yell about the need for a third party, I know I certainly don't agree with Trump or Harris 100% of the time. One I agree with far more than the other, but neither I agree with every time. I can say the same about every other office I voted for last November. I had to choose the candidate who was closest to aligning with my values.

You hit the nail on the head, there. Smartphones - and screens in general - are a addiction for millions now. People check their phones before they get out of bed, and they look at their phones in bed before they go to sleep. The phone is with them constantly and some people face crippling anxiety when their phone battery is too low. The phone triggers neurochemical pathways over time that are reinforced by habitual use.

People can't easily just walk away from habitual - or addictive - phone use. Doubly so, young users have an even harder time distancing themselves from it.

Now one can argue whether or not a "dumb" phone is a solution to this or not - it might well be equivalent to methadone for drug addicts that only helps some users - but regardless many screen addicts are facing a difficult challenge.

I'd recommend people to mod your comment up but we don't have enough users left here on slashdot with mod points for that to matter.

One huge problem there is that the same material is not "useful and productive" for everyone. I took three years of Spanish through high school and I can't handle the answers to simple questions in that language - yet I have very nearly no use for it whatsoever in my field of work. By comparison I have a sibling who went to Spanish immersion and does occasionally use the language - though we work in vastly different fields.

Similarly I use calculus on a regular basis, and chemistry and physics every week.

Yeah, outlook - in all its variants - is awful in Windows (in all of its variants). But there is another outlook that is even worse.

Namely, outlook for iOS. I've been forced to use this (along with outlook for windows on my work laptop) for years and it never gets better. It generally gets at least one update a week from Microsoft to patch the various security holes that are constantly being found.

What's so awful? We can start with the terrible search system. We can continue on with the completely arbitrary - and non-configurable - way that it decides which messages to keep offline for reading and searching when you're disconnected.

But those aren't nearly the worst. The worst has been around for a long time and there is no sign of them ever intending to change it. The worst problem with outlook for iOS is - strangely enough - not present in outlook for windows. The worst problem with outlook for iOS is that the default reply action is always reply all. This doesn't sound awful at first but if you work for a giant corporation of 10,000+ employees it can quickly become disastrous. An announcement to the company triggers an avalanche of replies that flood mail boxes around the world.

Being as no patch has ever changed this over the years it must be assumed that Microsoft sees this as "a feature and not a bug". Can we change the behavior on each device? Probably, but there is no way to roll that out throughout our enterprise.

When was the last time Microsoft actually fixed a bug or noticeably improved their OS?

I routinely have to use USB drives on PCs as part of my job. Yet windows still throws the useless message of 'device is in use' or some such worthless verbage that of course does not tell me what program is using my device. Most of the time I do nothing, wait 30 seconds and hey presto it's resolved. Rarely is there something actually using the USB drive.

We've had USB support in Windows for around 30 years now (going back to the second edition of 95). They've never changed this. GUIs for Linux figured this out a long time ago.

Any "real" Republican you are thinking of doesn't matter any more. Lincoln and Reagan would have both been chased out of today's MAGA party for being too soft and liberal. That kind of Republican simply is not allowed to exist today; Republicans support Trump or they lose their jobs, there is no middle ground.

Nations have split from other nations with minimal bloodshed before. The dissolution of the union of Norway and Sweden comes to mind - not truly bloodless but not catastrophic either. The question is whether the MAGA party would allow any territory to leave the country when they view outsiders as "subhuman" - that is the kind of rhetoric that is easily used to take - and not cede - territory.

I would be more specific. I think the United States of America is doomed, our democracy will end soon.

However there is a chance that something useful could come out of this once the national divorce is finalized. It won't be painless but it might actually be overdue. We might see the emergence of 3 or more new nations that can each go and do their own thing, and ride their preferred philosophies to their conclusions. If this can be done in a courteous manner this could have more winners than losers. Of course then Trump will be remembered as the last POTUS of the 50 states, but I suspect he might see that as a win.

I think the bigger questions that will be left to be answered if we go down that path include what happens to the national debt (at least the international parts of it) and of course who gets ownership of various national resources.