"In January 2006 the European Commission published the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe. The Study resulted from a detailed analysis of the current scholarly journal publication market, together with extensive consultation with all the major stakeholders within the scholarly communication process (researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, research policymakers, etc.).
The Study noted that 'dissemination and access to research results is a pillar in the development of the European Research Area' and it made a number of balanced and reasonable recommendations to improve the visibility and usefulness of European research outputs."
from Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results
It is a very important request, but not going far enough. Essentially, the petition requests all knowledge, result of publicly funded research to be made openly and freely (they are not explicit about it, but this is what I understand from the context) available and accessible.
In my opinion, this is the really minimum possible outcome. It is not good enough. Public funding should fund public projects and the results of those projects should be exploitable by the public - that means any intellectual property coming as an outcome of a publicly funded research should be made available to the community for no additional costs.
What do I mean by that? Take for example research resulting in a patent. If the research was funded by national public funds - the patent shouldn't incur any royalties or be enforced on any legal, physical or not, entity in that country. Similar arguments can be made about the European Union. In the end the public money are taxes paid even by potential competitors. That's fair play.
Otherwise you will end up paying several times for a product or knowledge already funded by you - most people pay their taxes, they fund research, it results in intellectual property, which in it's turn is resold to companies, which include the cost in a product payed by the tax payer. That is not fair.
