Congress’ Intervention In Scientific Publishing

An editorial in the NY Times has generated a lot of interest among scientists. It is written by a professor at UC Berkeley and Livermore National Lab whose passion has been to revolutionize scientific publishing; he founded a series of journals that are free to the reader and have, in just a few years established themselves as selective and high-quality. In his editorial, Professor Mike Eisen expresses concern about a new bill being introduced in Congress:

The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

The problem is that each government intervention has created more problems that then need to be fixed – a theme very familiar to Misesians. And the assumption is that the most desirable fix is to add more interventions. Now some – large publishing houses, according to Dr Eisen – are trying to reverse one of the recent “fixes.”

At root are two big causes of the controversy over scientific publishing: copyright protection and state-funded research. Neither of these is likely to be abolished, but that is truly the only thing that will prevent research from being “Bought, then paid for.” I believe this is morally correct, but also that science will not sufferwithout these subsidies and protections.

It is also relevant to note that Dr Eisen’s solution – to use open access publishing – still costs taxpayers money (although significantly less than the predominant subscription model) since researchers use federal grant money to pay the publication fees charged by such journals.

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11:39 am on January 14, 2012