Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

As you know from my last post , I am staunch proponent of open access to scientific information, especially the variety that I paid for by virtue of taxation . The Research Works Act ( HR3699 ) being proposed now will lock away taxpayer funded research from the hands of those whose hard-earned wages funded the research. It’s really a no-brainer and the NIH compromise was generous, allowing publishers to make a profit from research works for a whole year, during the crucial access time for new articles

The short of it ( covered in depth by Michael Eisen , and Razib tipped me off to the issue ) is that Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money. Currently, any research funded by the National Institute of Health must be made freely available to the public 12 months after publication. You can see why for-profit publishing companies do not like this policy.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results.