This makes me happy. It was such an obvious right thing to do, but it took so long to come to fruition.

Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.

If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results.

I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost.

They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.

As someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...

This is good though it's not clear whether these papers will appear in the PMC Open Access subset (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/) and be bulk downloadable.

I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib

My reading of this press release is that they are just removing the 12 month embargo period before the already mandated free-access (untypeset) versions of grant-supported manuscripts can go on pubmed central. The prior policy of a 12 month embargo period allowed publishers to have a small value add over the free version. This value add justifies subscription fees which support, among other things, infrastructure necessary to support peer review and possibly some in-house staff scientific editing and review. I do wonder whether it is worth it to make all papers available immediately if indirectly may make peer review even less supported than it is now.