Albert Einstein College of Medicine geneticist Brett Abrahams says,
“The notion that the government pays my salary and my colleagues’ salaries and enables us to do this very expensive research and then requires separate funding for us to access our work,” he said, “That’s insane.”
...open-access publishing is a fairer way to disseminate knowledge gained from publicly funded research. "...I don’t believe that we should continue with this system rigged in the way it is now.”
The current system is about selling knowledge and truth as commercial commodities. It takes big money to stay up-to-date and informed and traditionally, only the rich had the privilege. The alternative is Open Access publishing, which is breaking the stranglehold Big Pharma and Big Business have on science and medicine. And incidentally threatens things like SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, which are all about restricting the free exchange of information.
The Cost of Knowledge
Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. These are some of their objections:
1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
2. In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large "bundles", which will include many journals that those libraries do not actually want. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting the fact that some of their journals are essential.
3. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.
Unfortunately, one thing that's on the table is the National Institute of Health policy that makes Open Access a condition for getting government funding through the NIH. As reported on ATS in 2004:
The Bill for Open Access to publicly funded research failed to clear the Senate. Now, the NIH has bypassed the need for new legislation simply by adding a new clause to the standard agreement for grants and contracts - and making Open Access a condition for getting government funding through the NIH. No legislation is required.
As David Clark, Elsevier’s senior vice president for physical sciences, said in his defense of Elsevier's practices and business model,
“We’re not wild about government mandates,” such as the NIH’s mandate that any research supported with public funds be submitted to the publically accessible digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication in journals.
Uh huh.
the-scientist.com
(visit the link for the full news article)
edit on 7/2/12 by soficrow because: (no reason given)
The hits are coming hard and fast methinks, and so are the defence moves like PIPA, SOPA, ACTA and all the corporate "protections." 
