Everyone on HN is puzzling about how to ensure open access papers. The answer seems very simple: just have funding agencies (NSF/NIH/DARPA etc.) require a link to an Arxiv/ePrint version for each paper mentioned in an annual report.
For those who haven’t seen the current NSF system: for each paper you’ve published in a given year, you need to convert it into PDF/A (!!) and upload it to a private archival service run by the DoE, one that (I think) taxpayers can’t access.
(This PDF/A thing, as best I can tell, is just a subsidy for Adobe Creative Cloud. Every researcher I know converts their PDFs using a sketchy .ru website so that DoE server must be a haven of malware.)
I assume that if there’s ever a nuclear war, the DoE server holding our papers will retract into a giant underground shelter along with the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. This seems to be the only possible function for any of it.
Any post-apocalypse civilization’s first task will be to decode PDF/A. Entire religions and technological civilizations will spring up around the file format. And when those civilizations collapse due to rampant .ru malware, their descendants will have to do it all over again.
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