

House Bill Will Ban Open Access to Scientific Publications - troystribling
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/06/rep-conyers-wants-science-to-be-secret-or-you-will-pay/

======
wmf
These articles are interpreting the bill slightly wrong, although the end
result is mostly the same. The bill bans _government-mandated_ open access,
but scientists are still allowed to _voluntarily_ submit their papers to open
access journals such as PLoS.

~~~
Rod
Thanks for the clarification.

Just a thought experiment: forbidding scientists to submit papers to open
access journals would be a _bit_ too draconian, wouldn't it?

~~~
wmf
That sounds like it would be a first amendment problem.

~~~
jrp
It would certainly be evil, but not be unconstitutional, for the government to
require government-funded researchers to publish their government-owned ideas
wherever the government prefers.

If I develop cold fusion 'using university resources', then it's theirs,
according to my contract.

------
lliiffee
There is a real possibility that lobbying by _scientists_ is at least behind
this. I can easily imagine someone so angry that their grant forbids them from
sending their paper to _Nature_ (which has prestige above any open journal)
that they write to their representatives.

~~~
falsestprophet
That is a good point. But they can still submit to the Proceedings of the
National Academy, which is an equally prestigious journal.

------
cabalamat
I wish Americans wouldn't call a bill an act until such time as it is enacted.
When I read about the Blah Blah Blah Act, it is often not clear whether it's a
law or merely a proposal for a law. The British practice of always calling it
the Blah Blah Blah Bill until such time as it receives royal assent is better,
IMO.

------
Rod
_"John Conyers (D-MI) apparently has a problem with this. He is pushing a bill
through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers,
forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big
deal, but journals are very expensive."_

Who would have foreseen that academic journals had such lobbying power? I am
disgusted.

Many universities are following MIT OCW's great example and making their
lectures and course materials available online for free. Only a spineless,
corrupt politician would try to go the other direction.

~~~
falsestprophet
If I remember the numbers correctly, he is getting about 4x the contributions
from the academic publishing industry that non-supporters do. Anyway, all of
these sums are pretty trivial.

My roomate's uncle threw around something like $40,000 in the Capitol and got
a several million dollar award to do some preposterously high margin "aid
work."

I expect our government to be for sale. I am pretty upset it is so cheap.

~~~
pchristensen
One idea I like is to pay members of congress a ton (like $3M/yr) and then
execute them if they do anything wrong. Or something like that. That's like
$2B/yr in salaries but would probably save $500B-$1T/yr in graft.

