Biden has proposed firmer policies for making the results of federally-funded research, and the experimental data, available to the public(PDF).

This is a good step in the right direction, but we also need to do something about the harm done by trade secrecy for science and engineering that isn't federally funded. This harms medicine and denies users' right to repair hardware and program free software to run it.

The proposal has one small problem that is potentially disastrous: the new systems of publication don't have to take effect until 2025. If a right-wing government is elected in 2014, it could cancel them before they even take effect. Yes, that election would cause bigger disasters — but why enable it to cause another one?