It's Time For Our Tax Dollars To Do What Was Intended!

Government Health Researchers Pressed to Share Data at No Charge

Every year the US government spends BILLIONS of dollars in grants, contracts and other means of funding research, arts, humanities, etc., for business, academia and private individuals. Every year those millions end up benefitting the recipient of the grant without any benefit to "we the people." One of the more famous cases of this is Microsoft and Bill Gates: The very first commercial success of Microsoft was an adaptation of a public domain version of BASIC (a computer programming language) for the Altair 8800 home computer kit. Gates spent hours upon hours of time in the Harvard University computer labs--at a time when such computer time was very expensive--developing his product and was supposed to surrender any and all research products developed using these computers to either the public domain or the federal government.

The US Constitution provides for the government to promote research via a section called the "copyright clause:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" Article I: Section 8

At the time of the writing of the Constitution there was no federal or state funding for research. There is no historical evidence that the framers foresaw a time that the federal government would fund research, arts or science. But, there is historical evidence that the framers expected some share in the proceeds for which they, as leaders of government, paid some or all of the costs. If they funded an army, they wanted wins on the battlefield. If they funded ship building, they expected sea-worthy ships. If they funded construction of a building, they expected to get years of usefulness from the building. It only makes sense that if the federal or state government funds some research, art, literature or science, then we the people that paid for the effort should get some share in the end product or results.

So when I read this article, I was shouting hurrah!

Political momentum is growing for a change in federal policy that would require government-funded health researchers to make the results of their work freely available on the Internet.

Advocates say taxpayers should not have to pay hundreds of dollars for subscriptions to scientific journals to see the results of research they already have paid for. Many journals charge $35 or more just to see one article -- a cost that can snowball as patients seek the latest information about their illnesses.

Publishers have successfully fought the "public access" movement for years, saying the approach threatens their subscription base and would undercut their roles as peer reviewers and archivists of scientific knowledge.

But the battle lines shifted last month when a National Institutes of Health report revealed that a compromise policy enacted last spring -- in which NIH-funded scientists were encouraged but not required to post their findings on the Internet -- has been a flop. Less than 4 percent filled out the online form to make their results available for public viewing.

Now a key federal advisory committee has recommended that scientists who receive NIH grants be required to post their results within six months of publication. And the Senate is considering legislation that would mandate such disclosures for an even broader array of federally funded scientists.

"Given the exponential growth in new information, and how quickly new information becomes old information, it is very important that everybody . . . gets reasonably timely access to new research," said Thomas Detre, an emeritus vice chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He is chairman of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, which manages a publicly accessible database of medical research called PubMed Central.

The new push has opponents scrambling.

"We think it is too early to jump into a mandatory system," said James Pringle of the Publishing Research Consortium, a loose-knit group created to fight the public-access movement.

It is not just profit-hungry publishers who object to mandatory public access, opponents emphasize. Some nonprofit scientific and professional societies fear that without the income they receive from their research journals they will no longer be able to finance their educational and training programs.

"We make money off our journals, but it all goes back to enhance publishing and to enhance the needs of our scientific community," said Martin Frank, executive director of the Bethesda-based American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals. The society runs an award-winning mentoring program for minority scientists and educational programs for elementary schools and high schools.