Research Bought, Then Paid For: Open Access to Science Under Attack

Absurd. I accept that the journals will fight against open access. But it's bizarre to me that there are members of Congress who apparently think that the first priority of goverment-funded research is to support a bunch of businesses.<p>It reminds me of when then-Senator Santorum proposed a bill that would prohibit the National Weather Service to disseminate their forecasts for free as they do now and instead would only sell them to commercial outlets. He apparently also thinks that the purpose of government is to give money to corporations.<p>I generally am a believer in government being a force for good. But stuff like this taxes this belief.<p>The funny thing is that you never hear stuff like this happening in Sweden. The US government is apparently wholly subjugated by corporations. I don't understand how there isn't more of an uproar about this. You'd think that both small-goverment libertarian types and "socialists" (in the US use of the word) would agree that whatever the size of government, it shouldn't be beholden to commercial interests...

The author has had a series of really great blog posts on the subject as well on his personal site. In particular, check out:<p><a href="http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807" rel="nofollow">http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807</a><p>and make sure to read the comments, which includes a defense of the legislation by Tom Reller, Elsevier's VP.

For those unfamiliar with scientific publishing, Michael Eisen, the author of this Op-Ed is the founder of the PLoS series of open access journals, which are generally considered first-class publications in each of their fields. Michael Eisen has been leading the way in open access for the past decade.

To be fair, there is a dark underside to "open access".<p>One of the most significant open access publishers creates $100 million+ in value a year but, 20 years after inception, struggles to find a sustainable source of just $400,000 a year to fund operations. Few of the 100,000+ regular users have any idea of the lost opportunities and problems of talent retention that this site has had.<p>Perhaps I'm reacting to my most recent experiences with the "free" business model, but Tom Reller is right to say that what Elsevier does is more sustainable than most open access.

Yet even the author publishes regularly in closed-access journals such as Nature<p><a href="http://scholar.google.com/citations?sortby=pubdate&#38;hl=en&#38;user=z2foFg4AAAAJ&#38;view_op=list_works" rel="nofollow">http://scholar.google.com/citations?sortby=pubdate&#38;hl=en...</a>