We know a lot about PD. But how much would we know if we didn't have access to the NIH's Medline database where all the abstracts come from? There are people who would like to see that access eliminated unless you paid the $30 to $150 per paper that they would like to charge.

Current policy is that if research is paid for with tax dollars, that it must be made available to the taxpayer in a year's time. Sounds reasonable to me, but then I'm not a legislator listening to the whispers of those who would put a wall around research. Rep. John Conyers needs to hear from us and so do the 5 sponsors on his bill now in the House that would cripple the current system.

"Recently, government-sponsored agencies like NIH have moved toward open access of scientific findings. That is, the results are published where anyone can see them, and in fact (for the NIH) after 12 months the papers must be publicly accessible. This is, in my opinion (and that of a lot of others, including a pile of Nobel laureates) a good thing. Astronomers, for example, almost always post their papers on Astro-ph, a place where journal-accepted papers can be accessed before they are published.

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. They can cost a fortune: The Astrophysical Journal costs over $2000/year, and they charge scientists to publish in them! So this bill would force scientists to spend money to publish, and force you to spend money to read them."

From http://atheonews.blogspot.com/2009/0...be-secret.html

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