Bill proposed to block public access to publicly funded research

In summary: That's a poor comparison. The number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions vs. peer-review journals is many orders of magnitude apart. In fact, for example,...The number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions vs. peer-review journals is many orders of magnitude apart. In fact, for example, the number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions is about 0.0002% of the number of people who publish in peer-reviewed journals.
  • #1
Pythagorean
Gold Member
4,400
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More threats to the open research community. Between this and SOPA...

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/o...-for.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=research works&st=cse
 
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  • #2
Here is more information on the bill and what you can do to oppose it.

“Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online.”

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/31184
 
  • #3
What possible purpose does this bill have, other than to be a handout to a few journals?
 
  • #4
Jack21222 said:
What possible purpose does this bill have, other than to be a handout to a few journals?
Out of the blue two clueless politicians come up with this? Anyone think something is rotten in Denmark? Come on. I doubt either of them even knew any of those journals existed before they were "approached". And what's their reasoning to support this?
 
  • #5
Evo said:
Out of the blue two clueless politicians come up with this? Anyone think something is rotten in Denmark? Come on. I doubt either of them even knew any of those journals existed before they were "approached". And what's their reasoning to support this?

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like they're being paid off one way or another.
 
  • #6
Jack21222 said:
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like they're being paid off one way or another.
I'm not either, but how else would this have come about? It's obvious lobbyists got to them, whether it was perks or brainwashing doesn't really matter. How can this be in the best interest of the public? If taxpayer money is used to fund the research then stipulations on availabilty of the research should be allowed. Right now the journals have exclusive rights for a year. Considering that the journals don't actually pay for the research, they just profit off of publishing, I think that is more than fair. And they make a lot of money.
 
  • #7
Sounds like they're just returning to the old way. When NIH first started requiring free access, there was a lot of pushback from publishers. It's hard to cover costs if you're giving away your product free. All it ended up doing was raising publication costs since journals had to start charging enormous page fees to publish in order to offset free distribution.
 
  • #8
Moonbear said:
Sounds like they're just returning to the old way. When NIH first started requiring free access, there was a lot of pushback from publishers. It's hard to cover costs if you're giving away your product free. All it ended up doing was raising publication costs since journals had to start charging enormous page fees to publish in order to offset free distribution.
But they charge huge subscription fees, do you really think they are hurting? Considering the costs that book publishers have with no guaranteed sales or subsciptions, I can't see how these journals aren't making a killing.
 
  • #9
Evo said:
... It's obvious lobbyists got to them. ...
That seems like the most reasonable guess ... until more is learned about this. This has nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy, imo. It's just business as usual ... imho. And it's one of the things that might be improved upon wrt American politics ... again, just imho.
 
  • #10
ThomasT said:
That seems like the most reasonable guess ... until more is learned about this. This has nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy, imo. It's just business as usual ... imho. And it's one of the things that might be improved upon wrt American politics ... again, just imho.
No one is suggesting a conspiracy.
 
  • #11
Evo said:
But they charge huge subscription fees, do you really think they are hurting? Considering the costs that book publishers have with no guaranteed sales or subsciptions, I can't see how these journals aren't making a killing.

That's a poor comparison. The number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions vs. peer-review journals is many orders of magnitude apart. In fact, for example, I can probably count the number of subscriptions to the American Journal of Physics in my city of half a million on my hand. There is certainly good reason to suspect there is something going on but just saying that what they sell is expensive is hardly an argument.
 
  • #12
Pengwuino said:
That's a poor comparison. The number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions vs. peer-review journals is many orders of magnitude apart. In fact, for example, I can probably count the number of subscriptions to the American Journal of Physics in my city of half a million on my hand. There is certainly good reason to suspect there is something going on but just saying that what they sell is expensive is hardly an argument.
But book publishers have to pay authors up front before anything is published. It's a gamble that doesn't pay off many times. They have to pay for book tours and all of the associated expenses, advertising, forwarding books to bookstores never knowing if anything will sell. Journals have none of these expenses, it's pure guaranteed profit. What expenses do journals have? And they have exclusive rights for the first year! After a year, it's a bit old, eh? Plus they've already raked in the subscription money. There is no need for this bill.
 
  • #13
No matter what medium is used all journals will have expenses. As was said, it's hard to sell something if its being offered for free. That said, I do see an issue with not being able to see the results of something that our tax dollars paid for without having to pay for it again. But I'm sure the details are much different than what I imagine.
 
  • #14
Drakkith said:
No matter what medium is used all journals will have expenses. As was said, it's hard to sell something if its being offered for free. That said, I do see an issue with not being able to see the results of something that our tax dollars paid for without having to pay for it again. But I'm sure the details are much different than what I imagine.
But it's not free. They have pre-paid subscriptions that are a fortune, I would bet they're higher profits than your average publication, they have a captive audience. They don't need to print and distribute more than ordered. And for the first year, they can charge ridiculous amounts per paper. $35 for a paper when an entire magazine costs two bucks? What is that, $600 per magazine and they have no costs other than printing (and paying themselves). And that's on top of the millions of dollars in subscriptions fees. They will still continue to get all of this without the bill. They are not at risk of losing anything that they already have, that's the point, they want not only keep what they have, they want to take everything away from the public. What's wrong here?
 
  • #15
Evo said:
But it's not free.

What's not free? The work published on the NLMW's website is offered free of charge according to what was posted.

They will still continue to get all of this without the bill. They are not at risk of losing anything that they already have, that's the point, they want not only keep what they have, they want to take everything away from the public. What's wrong here?

You're telling a business not to after possible profit? Good luck with that. Businesses don't survive by not going after possible profit.
 
  • #16
Drakkith said:
What's not free? The work published on the NLMW's website is offered free of charge according to what was posted.
Do they not have pre-paid subscriptions from universities, medical centers, etc?? It's not provided for free.

You're telling a business not to after possible profit? Good luck with that. Businesses don't survive by not going after possible profit.
How many publishers have a bill passed guaranteeing them perpetual profits, on tax funded research, no less.
 
  • #17
Evo said:
But book publishers have to pay authors up front before anything is published. It's a gamble that doesn't pay off many times. They have to pay for book tours and all of the associated expenses, advertising, forwarding books to bookstores never knowing if anything will sell. Journals have none of these expenses, it's pure guaranteed profit. What expenses do journals have? And they have exclusive rights for the first year! After a year, it's a bit old, eh? Plus they've already raked in the subscription money. There is no need for this bill.

There's the key, can you actually show me that they have such minimal expenses?
 
  • #18
Pengwuino said:
There's the key, can you actually show me that they have such minimal expenses?
They don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, I don't believe they pay the reviewers, Vanadium50, ZapperZ, etc... can confirm this. Aside from printing and paying themselves what are their expenses? Do they disclose this publicly?

Cost

Many scientists and librarians have long protested the cost of journals, especially as they see these payments going to large for-profit publishing houses. To allow their researchers online access to journals, many universities purchase site licenses, permitting access from anywhere in the university, and, with appropriate authorization, by university-affiliated users at home or elsewhere. These may be quite expensive, sometimes much more than the cost for a print subscription

Concerns about cost and open access have led to the creation of free-access journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) family and partly open or reduced-cost journals such as the Journal of High Energy Physics. However, professional editors still have to be paid, and PLoS still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs; smaller journals do not often have access to such resources.

An article titled "Online or Invisible?" [4] has used statistical arguments to show that electronic publishing online, and to some extent open access, both provide wider dissemination and increase the average number of citations an article receives. Lawrence postulates that papers that are easier to access are used more often and therefore cited more often.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_journal#Cost

The term serials crisis has become a common shorthand to describe the chronic subscription cost increases of many scholarly journals.[1] The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than the Consumer Price Index for several decades,[2] while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining current subscriptions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis
 
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  • #19
Jack21222 said:
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like they're being paid off one way or another.

One of the co-sponsors of the bill Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), received $8.5k in contributions from executives of the Dutch publisher Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of scientific journals.

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807

I will note that the author of the above blog post (and the NY Times Op-Ed in the OP) is a co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) a group which publishes many open access journals. Instead of charging subscribers for the content, PLoS charges the authors of the scientific articles to defray the costs of publishing (these journals are also online-only, so there is much less overhead).

One disadvantage of charging authors instead of readers is that very good journals reject many more papers than they accept. However, the rejected papers still take up the journals resources (especially if they were sent to reviewers). Some critics claim that PLoS is able to make their model work because of the PLoS ONE journal that they publish, a journal which has more relaxed publication standard than other journals (it reviews papers to make sure the science is done correctly but articles are not judged on their perceived importance).
 
  • #20
Evo said:
They don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, I don't believe they pay the reviewers, Vanadium50, ZapperZ, etc... can confirm this. Aside from printing and paying themselves what are their expenses? Do they disclose this publicly?

Yes they do not pay reviewers nor the authors. The few journals I regularly read are published by non-profit publishers. It would be interesting to compare the costs journals purchased from for-profit and non-profit publishers
 
  • #21
Drakkith said:
What's not free? The work published on the NLMW's website is offered free of charge according to what was posted.

From what I understand, the research isn't free the first year.

You're telling a business not to after possible profit? Good luck with that. Businesses don't survive by not going after possible profit.

Yeah, but the business isn't going after possible profit on its own merits. It's begging the government for more profits. Worse than that, the business is bribing members of the government to give them more profits. So, yeah... I'm telling the business not to do that. And so should you.
 
  • #22
Jack21222 said:
From what I understand, the research isn't free the first year.

Ah I see.


Yeah, but the business isn't going after possible profit on its own merits. It's begging the government for more profits. Worse than that, the business is bribing members of the government to give them more profits. So, yeah... I'm telling the business not to do that. And so should you.

If you call lobbying bribing, then sure. The only issue I have with the whole thing is that it, apparently, is supported by taxes. If so, then there might be an issue. I'd have to get a lot more info to form an educated opinion, as I know that one thing I have learned in my life is almost always true; nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
 
  • #23
Authors should be charged to submit to journals, which means it inevitably comes from the taxpayers (i.e. the authors write it into their budget for their grant proposals) but distributed to ALL taxpayers, rather than the individual, poor researcher trying to make it. The idea being that all taxpayers benefit from R&D.

It's difficult as a starving college student when your library doesn't have a subscription to important journals in your field. It's hard to get a feel for what has been done and what's worth doing when you can't keep up with the field. Rural campuses suffer dramatically, since they're less likely to have diverse journals and faculty: double whammy. At least with diverse journal access, faculty and students could work together to keep up with the research.
 
  • #24
From an article printed in The Guardian last August, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist,
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays.

The answer is of course academic publishers. Perhaps this is just a case of the non-academic media being a bit jealous of academic publishing. There is a quite a bit to be jealous of. Who else has 30 to 40 percent profit margins? From an article published in The Economist last May, http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/
Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour. As other media falter, academic publishers have soared. Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%.
 
  • #25
Let's back up a bit.

First, this bill does not "block public access to publicly funded research". It no longer requires that publicly funded research papers be posted on one particular web site.

Second, there is no question that it costs money to produce a journal. You have to pay editors, compositors, and so on, so even if you don't pay authors and referees, there is money involved. The amount of money depends on the journal - medical journals, which often include high resolution photography are more expensive than physics journals which use line art - which are more expensive than philosophy journals, which are just text. Also relevant is the fact that most of these are fixed costs - printing 1 copy or 10 costs the same, and 1000 costs very little more.

It is certainly true that there are for-profit journals that make obscene profits. But even if they did not, journals would still be expensive. There are non-profit journals and they are less expensive, but not that much less expensive. A 30% profit is a lot, but setting that number to 0% won't reduce journal costs by a factor of 100.

In the "good old days", individual investigators charged journals to their grants. This was maybe a few thousand dollars. Then the funding agencies started asking the question "why are we paying for ten copies of the same journal to the same institution"? So they stopped paying for them, instead suggesting that the department share a single copy.

So, the number of copies of the journal circulating fell by an order of magnitude, and because the costs are fixed, the prices skyrocketed. It is not uncommon to have journals costing more than $5000 a year. That in turn provoked the question, "why should the public pay for this twice?" Somehow ten copies at $500 each is easier to swallow than one at $5000.

Where it looks like the field is going is back to "page charges", which will probably be steeper than we are used to. If we want journals, the money to produce them has to come from somewhere, and if the receiving end has grown to be impractical, the other end has to pick up the slack.

In the interest of full disclosure, I once got a $10 Starbucks or Amazon card from a journal for banging out a large number of reviews in a short time. The editor asked me to report on a pile of long-lingering papers.
 
  • #26
Drakkith said:
If you call lobbying bribing, then sure.

Well, yes, I do call many forms of lobbying bribery, particularly when part of the lobbying process is campaign donations.

DH quotes a source that says one publisher made 1.1 billion dollars in a year, even with the current rules. They're not exactly hurting. But, that isn't stopping them from buying off congresscritters to try to squeeze us for even more money.
 
  • #27
Vanadium 50 said:
Let's back up a bit.

First, this bill does not "block public access to publicly funded research". It no longer requires that publicly funded research papers be posted on one particular web site.

Second, there is no question that it costs money to produce a journal. You have to pay editors, compositors, and so on, so even if you don't pay authors and referees, there is money involved. The amount of money depends on the journal - medical journals, which often include high resolution photography are more expensive than physics journals which use line art - which are more expensive than philosophy journals, which are just text. Also relevant is the fact that most of these are fixed costs - printing 1 copy or 10 costs the same, and 1000 costs very little more.

It is certainly true that there are for-profit journals that make obscene profits. But even if they did not, journals would still be expensive. There are non-profit journals and they are less expensive, but not that much less expensive. A 30% profit is a lot, but setting that number to 0% won't reduce journal costs by a factor of 100.

In the "good old days", individual investigators charged journals to their grants. This was maybe a few thousand dollars. Then the funding agencies started asking the question "why are we paying for ten copies of the same journal to the same institution"? So they stopped paying for them, instead suggesting that the department share a single copy.

So, the number of copies of the journal circulating fell by an order of magnitude, and because the costs are fixed, the prices skyrocketed. It is not uncommon to have journals costing more than $5000 a year. That in turn provoked the question, "why should the public pay for this twice?" Somehow ten copies at $500 each is easier to swallow than one at $5000.

Where it looks like the field is going is back to "page charges", which will probably be steeper than we are used to. If we want journals, the money to produce them has to come from somewhere, and if the receiving end has grown to be impractical, the other end has to pick up the slack.

In the interest of full disclosure, I once got a $10 Starbucks or Amazon card from a journal for banging out a large number of reviews in a short time. The editor asked me to report on a pile of long-lingering papers.

A very fair and balanced perspective.

In your opinion, is there any further real role for print circulation of journals? Practically everyone in academia has (or should have) access to the Internet, so why the need for hard copies? Shouldn't the removal of the need to pay for printing and binding services pare costs very considerably? Just collate articles, proofread, format, fire up your desktop publishing software, upload it to your server, and presto, an issue is born! Server space cost per virtual page is ridiculously cheap compared to cost per printed page. And one can always print out the pdf with one's personal IT equipment should one choose to.

The funny thing is that the journal subscriptions which I've had that offer a differential rate between "online only" and "print version" schemes do give a cheaper rate for the former, but not by much. The difference seems artificially narrowed - almost as if the schmucks who make do with the soft copy online version are being compelled to subsidise the fossils who insist on hard copy bound issues. :grumpy:

Having done a fair number of reviews and authored some articles for medical journals myself, I can attest to having been paid exactly zilch. My friend and colleague serves as an editor for a few International journals, and I can tell you he's paid zilch too. I don't know how much the proofreaders are paid, if anything. The alleged escalating costs to produce these journals must be going somewhere. If it's not going to inequitable profit margins for the benefit of commercial publishers, it must be going to unnecessary printing costs. So I say: let's get rid of printing once and for all, go fully online, and see whether the costs come down by an order of magnitude (at least).

It's the same model as for music sales - for the longest time, the music cartel fudged the issue by selling music at inflated prices on commercially pressed media. When, after much resistance and reluctance, they were finally forced to go the "online" route by selling mp3s, the price per track became far more reasonable all of a sudden.
 
  • #28
Journals traditionally serve three purposes:

  1. Transmitting information
  2. Archiving information
  3. Keeping score.

Electronic distribution of papers has rendered the first one obsolete. The very first web application was "Spires", a high energy physics publication database. The communications function is now essentially done by the arXiv today.

The print journals are taking the second one very seriously. They are going back through past issues and making this available electronically - not just scanned, but re-entered so that text is searchable. Just because a paper is old doesn't mean its obsolete. I am reading a paper now from 1986 which is likely very relevant for a 2012 experiment. The money to do this is coming from subscriptions. And while the arXiv could take this role on, it's not really designed for that.

As for the third one, don't laugh. University administrators pay very close attention to things like number of publications and journal impact factors, and these do affect rankings, and rankings matter. (Rankings are why we get messages like "I want to go to MIT, but I don't know anything about it.") It's a system that is far from optimal, but nobody has come up with a better one. The problem here is that the people who most want to use this kind of ranking - university administrations and funding agencies - are the least willing to pay for it.

As one final thing to think about - why isn't there anything better than PubMed out there? The answer is that as long as PubMed is legally mandated, nobody can switch from PubMed to something else. A replacement would have to exist in addition to PubMed, not instead of PubMed. That's a pretty high barrier. One can argue that the requirement not to make the result public but to use the government's own database to do it has negative as well as positive effects on the public's ability to access this data.
 
  • #29
Drakkith said:
If you call lobbying bribing, then sure.

I definitely see a lot of lobbying as bribery. Just my two cents.
 
  • #30
Thanks Vanadium, that's what I was talking about when I said that nothing is as simple as it seems.
 
  • #31
Vanadium said:
First, this bill does not "block public access to publicly funded research". It no longer requires that publicly funded research papers be posted on one particular web site.

Yeah, I actually didn't put that title. My OP title said "Not again...". In defense of whoever changed the title though, it depends on how you define block. For me, it's definitely a block; I can't afford to buy articles at $30 a pop, and we know what it means for the publisher's that are actually lobbying for it... that they're going to block access; it will be a coin-operated block, sure... maybe you would prefer "socioeconomic filter".
 
  • #32
Personally, I think it's unavoidable that the Internet will, and must, change the rules of the publishing game. In my field, most information is already publicly available from the authors' sites or citeseeer.

The only hindrance I see is funding and 'keeping score,' or legitimacy. I would hope for some public sites where the publications are commented upon by professionals and are, say, backed with public endorsements of people. Which should be a better system since now a lot of comments on publications are now hidden from the viewers' eyes, which implies a lack of transparency, which implies a lack of scientific scrutiny and a lack of scientific debate.

To put that into perspective. Even in the semi-mathematical science which is computing science, I -as a hobbyist- frequently ended up having read articles which, on closer inspection, could not make their claims stick, or, rather, were just a damned waste of time to read. A public publishing scheme can avoid a lot of wasted time by scientists trying to decipher the legitimacy or validity of claims made.
 
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  • #33
Pythagorean said:
For me, it's definitely a block; I can't afford to buy articles at $30 a pop.

Nothing in this, as far as I know, prevents an author from posting his work on PubMed or any other site. What it does do is change it so that authors can no longer be required to post their papers on one particular site: PubMed.

There is a difference between "not requiring" and "forbidding".
 
  • #34
Vanadium 50 said:
Nothing in this, as far as I know, prevents an author from posting his work on PubMed or any other site.

One of our professors, in an open access conference, said that publishers have asked them to take their manuscripts down... not sure how many actually comply or if there's really any repercussions for not doing it.

Anyway, that wasn't my point (that authors can't post it). The point is that it's not automatically available. It shouldn't be left up to the author, either.
 
  • #35
Pythagorean said:
One of our professors, in an open access conference, said that publishers have asked them to take their manuscripts down... not sure how many actually comply or if there's really any repercussions for not doing it.

Anyway, that wasn't my point (that authors can't post it). The point is that it's not automatically available. It shouldn't be left up to the author, either.

In all the publications that I've made, there is a "transfer of copyright" from the author(s) to the journal. This is a sine qua non before they will agree to publish the paper.

This means that the author(s) lose the right to freely distribute or publish the article independently.

If the previous regulation (as I understand it) *mandated* that the article appear in PubMed as a precondition of the grant, then that's obviously something that the commercial publishing houses have to abide by. But in the absence of a legal stipulation, I suppose they can (theoretically, at least) come down hard on any author who goes his own way and publishes to PubMed (or anywhere else) without their explicit say-so.
 
<h2>1. What is the purpose of the proposed bill to block public access to publicly funded research?</h2><p>The purpose of this proposed bill is to restrict public access to research that has been funded by taxpayer money. This means that the general public would not be able to freely access the results of studies or experiments that have been paid for with public funds.</p><h2>2. How will this bill affect the scientific community?</h2><p>This bill would have a significant impact on the scientific community. It would limit the dissemination of research findings and make it more difficult for scientists to build upon each other's work. It could also hinder collaboration and slow down the progress of scientific knowledge.</p><h2>3. Why is there a push to block public access to publicly funded research?</h2><p>Some proponents of this bill argue that it is necessary to protect the intellectual property of researchers and their institutions. They claim that without this protection, researchers may be less inclined to pursue groundbreaking research if they cannot profit from it.</p><h2>4. What are the potential consequences of this bill?</h2><p>If this bill were to pass, it could have serious consequences for the advancement of scientific knowledge. It could also lead to a lack of transparency and accountability in research, as the public would not have access to the results of studies that they have funded.</p><h2>5. Is there any opposition to this bill?</h2><p>Yes, there is significant opposition to this bill from various groups, including scientists, publishers, and open access advocates. They argue that publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public, as it is a product of taxpayer money and should not be restricted.</p>

1. What is the purpose of the proposed bill to block public access to publicly funded research?

The purpose of this proposed bill is to restrict public access to research that has been funded by taxpayer money. This means that the general public would not be able to freely access the results of studies or experiments that have been paid for with public funds.

2. How will this bill affect the scientific community?

This bill would have a significant impact on the scientific community. It would limit the dissemination of research findings and make it more difficult for scientists to build upon each other's work. It could also hinder collaboration and slow down the progress of scientific knowledge.

3. Why is there a push to block public access to publicly funded research?

Some proponents of this bill argue that it is necessary to protect the intellectual property of researchers and their institutions. They claim that without this protection, researchers may be less inclined to pursue groundbreaking research if they cannot profit from it.

4. What are the potential consequences of this bill?

If this bill were to pass, it could have serious consequences for the advancement of scientific knowledge. It could also lead to a lack of transparency and accountability in research, as the public would not have access to the results of studies that they have funded.

5. Is there any opposition to this bill?

Yes, there is significant opposition to this bill from various groups, including scientists, publishers, and open access advocates. They argue that publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public, as it is a product of taxpayer money and should not be restricted.

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