“Taxpayers would have to shell out $15 to $35 to get behind a publisher’s paid site to read the full

[KoKo]

Lena Groeger
ProPublica / News Report
Published: Thursday 12 January 2012
“Taxpayers would have to shell out $15 to $35 to get behind a publisher’s paid site to read the full research results.”



Right now, if you want to read the pub­lished re­sults of the bio­med­ical re­search that your own tax dol­lars paid for, all you have to do is visit the dig­i­tal archive of the Na­tional In­sti­tutes of Health. There you’ll find thou­sands of ar­ti­cles on the lat­est dis­cov­er­ies in med­i­cine and dis­ease, all free of charge.

A new bill in Con­gress wants to make you pay for that, thank you very much. The Re­search Works Act would pro­hibit the NIH from re­quir­ing sci­en­tists to sub­mit their ar­ti­cles to the on­line data­base. Tax­pay­ers would have to shell out $15 to $35 to get be­hind a pub­lisher’s paid site to read the full re­search re­sults. A Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can blog said it amounts to pay­ing twice.

Two mem­bers of Con­gress — Reps. Dar­rell Issa, R-Calif., and Car­olyn Mal­oney, D-N.Y. — in­tro­duced the bill. Re­becca Rosen of The At­lantic finds it cu­ri­ous that Issa, a well-known cham­pion of the open In­ter­net whose own web­site dis­plays the words “keep the web #OPEN,” would back a bill that ap­pears to be the polar op­po­site of open ac­cess.

As Michael Eisen, a Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, bi­ol­o­gist and open ac­cess sup­porter, notes, Mal­oney's sup­port seems no less mys­ti­fy­ing since she rep­re­sents “a lib­eral De­mo­c­ra­tic dis­trict in New York City that is home to many re­search in­sti­tu­tions.”

Both Issa and Mal­oney have re­ceived cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions from the Dutch com­pany El­se­vier, which calls it­self the world’s lead­ing pub­lisher of sci­en­tific and med­ical in­for­ma­tion. Ac­cord­ing to Map­Light, a web­site that tracks po­lit­i­cal cash, El­se­vier and its se­nior ex­ec­u­tives last year made 31 con­tri­bu­tions to House mem­bers to­tal­ing $29,500. Twelve con­tri­bu­tions to­tal­ing $8,500 went to Mal­oney; Issa re­ceived two for a total of $2,000.

MUCH MORE and a GOOD READ, at............
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-bill-would-put-taxpayer-funded-science-behind-pay-walls-1326388105

[ooglymoogly]

1. +1 nt

[No Elephants]

2. Charge me once, shame on me. Charge me twice...Well, you can't charge me again!