Research grants from Federal agencies fund work at universities and other places. In 2013, the Obama administration charged large federal agencies with ensuring that the resulting research reports are made openly available to the public. Authors may publish where ever they like, but some version of the paper must be free to read on the internet. Various organizations help make this happen: ORCID, CHORUS and CrossRef.
Authors register for a unique ORCID identifier, and share it, and their funding source identifier from CrossRef's FundRef, with their publisher when submitting a paper. Publishers and funding agencies share information with CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States), a non-profit organization, which provides "a neutral, stable, and effective platform to help increase public access to peer-reviewed publications reporting on U.S. funded research". If that publisher is working with CHORUS, the published article on the journal's website is made freely available outside the paywall (possibly after an embargo period).
Funding agencies working with CHORUS include the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other U.S. agencies. Over 100 publishers are involved, including Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, IEEE, WIley, Wolters-Kluwer, HIndawi, Nature, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, Duke University Press, and many more.
"To initiate CHORUS’ services, authors simply have to identify their funding sources when submitting a paper for publication with a participating publisher. That action tags the article with CrossRef’s FundRef service, triggering free public access of the best available version (either the final, published version or the author’s accepted manuscript), either immediately on publication or after a designated embargo period." http://www.chorusaccess.org/about/how-it-works/
SPARC is monitoring and gathering information about current Federal data sharing requirements.