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I think a good compromise would be to allow exclusive publishing rights for a time, but the data should be available from day one. My thought is that a Journal can create a well-edited article on the research and they should have the right to not compete against other entities that wish to profit from it (there is only so much money to be made in academic publishing--mostly by academic libraries). But, if it is publicly funded, the research data should be available for other researchers and the public. A fictional example would be for the Agriculture Research institute at State University to use a federal grant to study the effect of some bug infestation on some certain crops. Well, the institute should make that research available on the internet, but the conclusions by the researchers might be published exclusively in the Horticultural Science Review for one year, but since their conclusions were part of the grant, they should then be required to publish that freely on their institute website after that year. Or, the Horticultural Science Review could be creative and pay the researcher for a special article that is much more exciting and they might then have a full copyright on that article they actually paid for. But, the data and grant funded conclusion should be open and publicly available. This would be akin to many Universities having rights to the dissertations of its PhD students for their particular school or library, but then that student can clean up the dissertation and make it more interesting and readable for publishing to a larger market.

Of course, not being a researcher or publisher, my ideas could really miss some of the important issue. In the end however, I don't think a commercial or non-profit entity should have exclusive rights to something paid for by tax payers unless they buy that data and essentially pay the tax-payers back!

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