Then the publishers get thousands of dollars from taxpayer money for each article published under the open access route, while still billing universities for many thousands to give access to the non open access ones.

Right, and that is why the same government bodies need to cap the amount that can be paid towards open access fees or page charges via a grant. If grants only provided $200 per publication that would end the ridiculous open access fees / APCs that currently get charged. There is no reason it should cost thousands of dollars to publish an article given the limited proofing most journals now do, the ability to easily submit works in a template provided by a journal, and that peer-review is uncompensated.

This already happens. You can find all US NIH funded research for free on pubmed.

Well, that just shows it happens in the US, but it's the same for most tech journals and Google scholar/arxiv

Just a data point: Google scholar regularly reminds me of any publications of mine that list US gov funding that do not have a publicly accessible PDF.

You are already allowed to (at least in tech) provide a preprint and public PDF on personal (non commercial) or educational web sites.

And Google scholar does associate those with the publishers links, as an alternative source.

So, it's not like we couldn't provide all R&D for free already. At least in tech.

That doesn't solve the problem of funneling public money to elsevier/springer nature. The model in which volunteers perform 95% of editorial work yet private publishing companies charge abhorrent prices for OA is absolutely disgusting.

I’m all for government agencies requiring research to be available to everyone, full disclosure I work for one, but I’m pretty against paying the open access ransom to do it. GP seems to have a beef with the DoE, but policy requires all published works that have even one DoE employee on them be licensed perpetually royalty free and transferable to the government, and that works funded by the office of science (and many other sources) be available through free open platforms like OSTI.gov. Why should we waste grant money on the thousand+ dollar fees to the publishing houses rather than making it free through the already existing, already required, and already working channels? Of course, this is for Computer Science and mathematics. I can’t speak for other fields.