Government Makes NIH Research Open Access

TaeKwonDood writes "Let's give some credit to the government when they do something right; in this case freeing $29 billion of taxpayer money in NIH research to actual taxpayers. Within one year after peer review, NIH-funded research has to be made freely available on PubMed. A Democratic Congress passed it and a Republican president signed it. This is a tremendous asset to researchers who don't want to have to duplicate research or pay fees for every journal out there. Those media companies getting rich selling journals, like the ACS, don't like it, but everyone else will."

Comments

Bad news for the libertarians

[Lengyel]

The government did something right. So much for the Ron Palsies.

Re:No science open source or otherwise without fun

[bit01]

Yeah, now if we can just fix the NIH funding problem. We've gone years now completely ignoring biomedical research in this country.

Completely ignoring? According to the article you researchers are getting $29,000,000,000 of my tax money. I hope you're spending it responsibly. Are you?

A number of "researchers" I know are spending their grant money on things of little research value. Research in general suffers from the problem of political operators out-competing the genuine researchers to get grant money. Until researchers as a group take peer review more seriously and are truly willing to give political operators the boot you're going to continue to see funding decrease simply because the payback for the general population isn't there.

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Keep your options open!

Blame

[slapout]

It's Bush's fault! He signed the bill! It's his fault!

Come on now. You can't have it both ways. You can't keep claiming that everything bad that happens is his fault and then not give him credit for the good.