Anyone withholding the methods and results of a clinical trial is already in breach of multiple codes and regulations, including the Declaration of Helsinki, various promises from industry and professional bodies, and, in many cases, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Amendment Act of 2007. Indeed, a recently published cohort study of trials in clinicaltrials.gov found that more than half had failed to post results; and even though the FDA is entitled to issue fines of $10,000 a day for transgressions, no such fines have ever been levied [3].

ost promising in this regard are ideas for introducing a National Software Foundation, perhaps within the National Science Foundation, that will fund soft- ware development projects on condition that the fruits be licensed as free software, and the adoption of a government procurement policy that would require that software written under government contract be released as free software

One respondent noted that NSF doesn't have an enforcement policy. This is presumably true of other mandate sources as well, and brings up the related and perhaps more significant problem that mandates are not always (if they are ever) accompanied by the funding required to satisfy them. Another respondent wrote that funding agencies expect universities to contribute to long-term data storage.