Your tax dollars pay for all sorts of things. Road construction, social security, medicare and plenty of other programs are paid for out of your paycheck every month. In return, taxpayers—and visitors, in some cases—are able to enjoy the benefit of these things for free.
Your tax dollars pay for all sorts of things. Road construction, social security, medicare and plenty of other programs are paid for out of your paycheck every month. In return, taxpayers—and visitors, in some cases—are able to enjoy the benefit of these things for free.
However, a certain piece of legislation could change that for at least one of these things.
Currently, publicly funded studies are free for view of the people. Anyone who wishes to see the results of, say, a medical trial that their tax dollars went toward would be able to access those studies free of charge. It’s their money going into it, after all; it’s only logical to let them see what they’ve paid for.
However, H.R. 3699 IH—otherwise known as the Research Works Act—seeks to limit that access. The bill, if passed, would force those wishing to access the work in question to pay a fee of $15–35 per study or subscribe to the publications.
This, of course, requires the payment to go to the publishers of these studies.
For the record, a one-year subscription to most scientific publications ranges from $300–900.
And you thought a subscription to National Geographic was expensive.
The people pushing for this bill are, naturally, the publishers themselves. As it stands, new studies that are publicly funded must be paid for for the first year and become free for public access after one year has passed. Some even argue that the one year embargo on free public access should be lifted and that all publicly funded studies should be free for public viewing from the day they are published.
Under the new bill, all new research would not be made available to the public for free unless the research was independently funded, independently published and the researchers all agreed to release the finished product free of charge of their own volition. Such things rarely happen, but that is none of Congress’ concern.
Of course, it is the publishers’ prerogative to make a profit, and it makes sense that Congress wishes to award them greater opportunity to do this. However, this is a case where the public actually suffers from the law.
Students in the sciences, for example, are often expected to critically analyze and reference anywhere from 10–30 studies if they are assigned a research project. Often times, graduate students performing their own research must check publicly funded studies with regularity to determine whether their hypotheses have already been tested or what related studies may have found.
Professionals face these issues as well. The National Institutes of Health funds a significant amount of medical research. This research is often used by physicians, drug developers, pharmacists, clinical studies and those charged with teaching new generations of those wishing to enter these disciplines.
Whereas many of these studies would be available to these people for free now, the Research Works Act could easily limit the research they could share with their colleagues.
Worse yet, many times it is difficult to tell precisely what a study contains with the information found in the abstract (the summary, for those non-scientific readers), which is free for all studies, new or not. Scientists and researchers might not be able to find a study that they can use without ruining their budgets.
To put it into terms anyone can relate to, it’s like reading the back of a shrink-wrapped book. You can see the title, which may or may not relate explicitly to the content, the author and a brief paragraph or so explaining what is inside—but you can’t flip through it to figure out if you’ll like it until you’ve already paid.
The scientific world is looking at a future filled with nothing but shrink-wrapped books.
But what is probably worst of all is that these studies are already paid for by tax dollars. Given that there are more than 200 million other people in the United States paying into this fund, one’s individual contribution is understandably low. But the fact still remains that you’ve already paid for the research to be done in the first place.
It’s like being told to pay for your food and then for the right to eat it.
The Research Works Act must be stopped. Everyone benefits from the opportunity to access research, whether they choose to act on that opportunity or not. For all we know, the next Einstein or Bohr could be sitting behind a computer as we speak, voraciously reading all the studies he can and postulating ways to fix everything that’s wrong with the world.
Whether it is the student trying to write his dissertation or the pharmacist going above and beyond trying to assuage the fears of a new mother who wonders if she should vaccinate her son against Measles, Mumps and Rubella, everyone should be able to access publicly funded research.
Knowledge belongs to everyone. Limiting access to that knowledge ought to be criminal, not law.
