Ethics

Is Conyers Shilling for Scientific Publishers?

By Ed Brayton

Larry Lessig, a legal scholar and the founder of Change Congress, and Michael Eisen, a prominent professor of genetics, have a scathing article at the Huffington Post accusing Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) of selling out the public to the interests of private publishers of scientific journals. Writing about a law introduced by Conyers, they state:

Right now, there's a proposal in Congress to forbid the government from requiring scientists who receive taxpayer funds for medical research to publish their findings openly on the Internet.

This ban on "open access publishing" (which is currently required) would result in a lot of government-funded research being published exclusively in for-profit journals -- inaccessible to the general public.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on March 06, 2009 (boomark / email).