Slashdot Mirror
A Bid for Public Access to Fed-Sponsored Research
An anonymous reader submits "Your taxes support lots and lots and lots of research that gets published in journals that you can't access without paying absurd fees to the journal publishers. So, for example, if you'd like to read the latest research on SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) because your pregnant wife had two sibs die of it, you can't, even though you paid for it. Well, somebody's trying to fix this — there's a pending bill (Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, S.2695) to require public access to Federally-funded research: This would let anybody access the work for free within six months of its acceptance for publication by a peer-reviewed journal."
As a scientist I have to say this is a great idea, but it misses the main problem of government-funded research. Certainly if the public paid for the research, they should be able to read the paper, but an even more important issue is that of patentability. The current situation is: we (taxpayers) pay for basic research. Then the universities get to patent the results. Next, private companies license the patents and get a monopoly on sale of products embodying the results of reserach we paid for. The rule has to be that the results of research that has been funded by the public are not patentable. If you want to patent the result, use private money (industry grants, university tutition money, whatever).