Starting in 2013, all US-funded work needs to end up publicly accessible within a year of publication. There are slightly different ways, depending on the funder, but it's the rule.
Canada's Tri-Council Agencies have had a similar policy from 2016 onward, ditto EU....
Older papers are tricky though. I'm not sure the government can compel you to make something available.
For me, the rise of preprints has blunted the impact of that exclusivity period: something approximating the full text is usually available, whether from the publishers, PMC, or bioarxiv. This might depend on a lot of discipline--neuro dove head-first into preprints and I think they're less common in other fields.
It's not obvious to me what the "right" fee is. The NPG fees seem bonkers. The PLoS journals and eLife aren't trying to turn a profit, are a bit lower but still in the few thousand dollar range, so there must be some non-obvious, non-trivial expenses.
I hadn’t heard about this, is there a keyword I can use to learn more?
This is a "meta-policy" of sorts, in that it directs grant-making agencies to form policies of their own. A lot was written about it at the time, most of which includes its title "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research."
It came up again in 2020 when OSTP considered revising the rules (e.g., https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/will-trump-white-hou...)
Depending on your interests, you could then look at individual agencies' policies.
- Here's the NIH policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov Search for something in PubMed and there will be a "PMC Free Full Text" icon if it's available from PubMed Central. Some publishers just lower the paywall, in which case it says "free from publisher".
- An FAQ for the NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp
- The DoD hosts its own repository called DTIC. Heres' the policy stuff: https://discover.dtic.mil/policy-memoranda/ Open access is the last section. You can search at the top-right for DoD funded research.
- Not to be outdone on the acronym front, the DOE has a site called PAGES, which ostensibly stands for Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science: https://www.osti.gov/public-access
- Those are the biggies, but there are a ton of federal agencies covered by the policy. Here's the USDA's plan: https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USDA-Publ...