January 30, 2012
Congress wants to limit your access to medical research, even though your tax dollars paid for it
by Alliance for Natural Health
Congress wants to limit your access to research—even though your tax dollars paid for it. If this bill passes, you’ll learn only what mainstream medicine wishes you to know.
In 2008, the National Institutes of Health required that all federally funded research publications be made openly available. PubMedCentral (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine.
The publishers of the journals weren’t so happy with this new arrangement—they were afraid no one would pay for their publications if the research results were immediately accessible. So the government agreed to give them a full year of journal sales before their research papers had to be posted on PMC, which lets them keep their subscriber base. Journal subscriptions to educational and medical institutions are expensive—and they’re big business.
But even this generous arrangement isn’t good enough for the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
That title (which I know you’re only quoting) is highly misleading.
The alegation seems to be that AAP and other for profit publishers want to limit access to their own back-catalogues and have found a couple of congressmen to shill for them. What Congress “wants to do” is unclear.
Personally I don’t think the fact that the government funds medical research necessarily means that information should be free to anyone who wants it. Nor do I think it would necessarily be a good thing if it was.
Publishing lobbyists want to limit your access to medical research, even though your tax dollars paid for it
Fixed that for you.
The current online publishing setup for research is terrible. That’s certainly worthy of it’s own thread without turning it into another political pile on.
Labs in the US are not the only labs that publish. Why should you have free access to papers funded by German tax payers?
I shouldn’t…unless the publisher is taking US tax dollars. My guess is that German publishers are not compelled to make German studies public by American law.
so you want pubmed to detect where people are when they are searching for papers and block foreign computers from viewing papers funded by US tax dollars? or you want pubmed to filter searches so that you only see US data?
Publishing lobbyists want to limit your access to medical research, even though your tax dollars paid for it
Fixed that for you.
The current online publishing setup for research is terrible. That’s certainly worthy of it’s own thread without turning it into another political pile on.
As was pointed out earlier, I just used the title as it was stated in the original article. On other forums this is a term of service requirement, so I figured it was a good idea to use here, also.
I’m sure the source of the article could be questioned with regard to bias, as well.
PubMedCentral (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine.
If you don’t want it to be public, don’t take tax funds that would subject it to publishing on this open site.
.
its not the scientists that are against the data being public. Scientists want to publish in high impact journals, regardless of the pubmed rules. When you submit a paper, the journal makes you submit to the data being freely available. I don’t know anyone who cares if people have to pay to see their papers or not.
its not the scientists that are against the data being public. Scientists want to publish in high impact journals, regardless of the pubmed rules. When you submit a paper, the journal makes you submit to the data being freely available. I don’t know anyone who cares if people have to pay to see their papers or not.
So it is about the publishers. Publishers who take public money should not be surprised that at some point they will be required to make their publications public. As the old saying goes, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Things funded by tax money are owned (at least in part) by the public.