The Washington Post
August 5, 2003
A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research
Online Plan Challenges Publishers’ Dominance
By Rick Weiss
Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download
medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the
results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes?
The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded
by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues (Harold Varmus,Patrick O. Brown and Michael Eisen), is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world — a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.
In its place the organization is constructing a system that would put scientific findings on the Web — for free.Scientists and budget-squeezed librarians have long railed against publishers’ stranglehold on scientific literature, to little avail. But with surprising political acumen, the Public Library of Science — or PLoS
— has begun to make “open access” scientific publication an issue for everyday
citizens, emphasizing that taxpayers fund the lion’s share of biomedical research and deserve access to the results.
“It is wrong when a breast cancer patient cannot access federally funded research data paid for by her hard-earned taxes,” Rep. Martin O. Sabo(D-Minn.) said recently as he introduced legislation that would give PLoS a boost by loosening copyright restrictions on publicly funded research. “It is wrong when the family whose child has a rare disease must pay again for research data their tax dollars already paid for.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19104-2003Aug4.html
Comment: Should the results of publicly-funded medical research be placed in the public domain, or should the results remain the intellectual property of others, marketed by copyright-protected scientific journals? Should we continue to support the superfluous middleman publishers who control access for the purpose of profit, or should we establish our own “public library” with universal access and lower administrative costs?Just as we are reassessing the high costs, administrative excesses and restricted health care access through our system of private health plans, we should also be reassessing the unnecessary costs and restricted access to the results of medical research that we have funded.