Hold up now, that's mistaking the people who take the outside cash (namely, the folks who actually do the research) for the people who want to "own" something (namely, the ASA wanting limited term exclusive publication right for papers that people submit to them).
It's not the ASA taking the public funding. The folks who do the research should make their research results available for free, irrespective of what the ASA wants to do: the value of an ASA or any other similar association is in "being a peer-reviewed publication platform" that publishes vetted research (well, ideally. We all know the problems here). For that, having a publication publishing right where you are the only periodical that gets to release a product consisting of collections of research results does not interfere with any law that says that if you, as researcher(s), take public funding to do research, your research data and results should be freely available.
Sure, but laws around publicly funded research allow for that specifically in the context of peer-reviewed periodical publication (preventing folks from publishing in many different periodicals) while at the same time mandating that the research data and results should be freely available to the public. Because those two contexts are worlds apart.
What is this comment implying? I don't think it was meant as a retro-active implementation. Future research funded by tax dollars would be impacted, not past research. So it seems to align just fine with what you're saying.
Which I agree is the appropriate way to move forward. However, I see a lot of retroactive bitterness about research when this was not the case. e.g. posters in this thread calling for journals and scientists to crushed like parasites, ect.
