As a librarian, shifting the costs to the authors, even if the money is ultimately coming from the same source, is beneficial. Currently authors pick which journal to publish in mainly on the perceived prestige and whether or not they think they have a reasonable chance of getting their paper accepted. Making the authors sensitive to the costs is probably the only practical way to change publishing habits, though in of itself, it's not sufficient. Authors can reasonably claim they don't have a choice either, at least until they get tenure, as they need to publish often and in highly-regarded journals in order to survive in the academic world. Libraries, as servants of the researchers, have little influence over what journals we actually subscribe to. Our mission is to support the research goals of the faculty. If they need a journal, and our budget allows, we pretty much have to get it. We can suggest that the researches publish in open access journals, or society journals instead of commerical ones, but ultimately we don't have any levers of influence beyond simple persuasion. The only people that can actually influence to cost of a journal are the authors, as they have the ultimate club to use on the publishers: withholding content. From the point of view of libraries, this proposed legislation is a very good thing. At my library, we spend in excess of 2 million dollars (US) on journal subscriptions each year, the majority of them being science-technology-medical journals. Our budget is entirely paid for by state taxpayers, tuition, and bond funds (we're state university). While the university does skim off about 50% of all grant funds for 'overhead', the library does not see any of that money. We would certainly keep subscriptions to core journals in each discipline, where a 6 month wait would be undesirable. And this would not spell doom for the publishing industry. Many publishers already make their content freely available after a 6month - 2 year embargo and have not suffered (see Highwire). The people that would be impacted are the shareholders in the large commercial publisher, as the stocks prices might fall a bit when publishers like Elsevier can no longer deliver 5 billion dollar per year profits