Pay for it Twice

or

What’s in it for Whom? (Which is one of my favorite questions ever)

or

Hey, This Has Nothing to do with Neil Gaiman!

I read this interesting article in Boing Boing that said that Rep. John Conyers has introduced legislation in Congress that would chip away at our right to access information. The bill would disallow government funding agencies from requiring that recipients of federal research grants make the results of their research freely accessible to the public. That means that you or I could pay for the research twice – once through our taxes, and once more to access the results of the research that our taxes funded. Currently, the law says that the information must be made freely accessible to the public within 12 months. This makes sense, since the public paid for the research in the first place.

Scientists don’t stand to gain from this legislation. They don’t get paid for their articles anyway. In fact, according to this article in the Financial Times, 33 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, research librarians, and patients’ rights advocates are all actively opposing the legislation, and the current and former heads of the NIH say that this legislation, if passed, would hurt the advancement of science. The folks who do stand to gain from a change like this one are members of the publishing industry, which is threatened by the rise in support in the scientific community for open access peer-reviewed journals. Also according to Larry Lessig, the bill’s co-sponsors in Congress receive twice as much financial support from publishing interests as their non-sponsoring colleagues. So that explains a lot.