Things are changing. Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications. This does not mean that the actual final version of the paper will be available to everybody though: normally it's the unedited copy, the manuscript as it was submitted to the journal before publication.
This is definitely the case with all bio/medical research; isn't like this in computer science and other sciences too? Is the publishers lobby so powerful?
In the US, you're probably thinking of the NIH's open access policy. The NIH is the largest research agency, with a more than $30 billion dollar budget, so this does cover a lot of US research, but it doesn't cover research from many other agencies.
There has been a concerted (though not yet successful) effort to extend this type of open access mandate to all US federal agencies with budgets over 100 million. See, for example: http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/index.shtml
With a lot of work, I believe these efforts are likely to be successful. But there is real opposition, not just from some journal publishers, but also from some politicians. See, for example, the efforts by John Conyers (D-Mi) to roll back the NIH open access policy: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#n...
In the UK, all seven UK Research Councils have similar open access policies. The last one to adopt such a policy was the Physical Sciences and Engineering Council, which I believe is the one relevant to computer science research. That policy was adopted in 2009, I believe, and so we're only starting to see the effects now.
Thank you for the very detailed comment. Yes, NIH is what I had in mind. I was under the impression it wasn't going to be just NIH though, as it happens in fact in the UK.
As for the opposition from politicians: isn't this a typical case of lobbies trying to hide behind some representative of choice to fight their battle?
That may apply where you work, but it is not universal. I work at NASA and almost all the papers we generate are (regrettably) published behind paywalls. And the consequences are far worse than having to fork over a few (thousands of) dollars to read them--our scientists are contractually bound NOT to discuss their research during the blackout period prior to publication. It's stifling to research and the community.
Out of curiosity, which journals are these? The NASA scientists I know of that work in astrophysics seem to publish in the normal journals and put their papers on arXiv like everyone else.
The blackout period should be what we call "embargo" and it is a requirement of the publisher; as for the rest: I thought hard sciences had solved the OA problem long time ago with the adoption of arxiv. Why don't you use arxiv?
This is definitely the case with all bio/medical research; isn't like this in computer science and other sciences too? Is the publishers lobby so powerful?