Friday, January 13, 2012

I thought I was done with IP stories for a while

But I can't let this one pass unnoted. From Propublica (via Felix Salmon):

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 [1] 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 [2] would prohibit the NIH from requiring scientists to submit their articles to the online database. Taxpayers would have to shell out $15 to $35 [3] to get behind a publisher’s paid site to read the full research results. A Scientific American blog said it amounts to paying twice.

No comments:

Post a Comment