As the article mentioned, in the US, much publicly-funded research already is required to be freely available. Specifically, anything funded by the NIH-- which

As the article mentioned, in the US, much publicly-funded research already is required to be freely available. Specifically, anything funded by the NIH-- which means pretty much all biomedical research-- has to end up in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central repository. It's actually the author's responsibility to submit it, but most publishers take care of it for you. While this model is not without its problems, I think it's a pretty amazing start and has proved itself to be well worth the hassle. The NLM has put into place a great deal of infrastructure to make it easy for authors and publishers to submit their content, and the PubMed Central site itself is a great resource for researchers.