Articles of contention

Who would have thought that academics might be opposed to the dissemination of information? A recently proposed congressional act, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, would require certain government agencies to publish online any articles containing research funded by public grants. It has been met with some hostility among the management of scholarly journals whose income depends upon the selling power of these articles.\nWere this bill to be passed, any article published in an applicable scholarly journal would have to be made available electronically (free of charge) within six months. Obviously, this doesn't sit particularly well with editors and producers of such journals; their argument is that free online publication of their articles would reduce their subscriptions and, hence, their ability to sell advertising space.\nThe New York Times recently quoted a director of public affairs for a scholarly journal as saying that "People won't be able to gauge how many people will be reading the articles and that has ramifications for advertising (and) promotion." In effect, these magazines will be forced to give away the copy they usually sell.\nThe problem is that the content these publications are hawking has been funded by taxpayer money. Journals provide a means of editing, condensing and digesting the immense amount of research published every year -- but to charge the taxpayer twice is unfair.\nScholarly journals provide a peer-edited forum in which academics can present their findings. But they are also a product of an era in which magazine or journal publication was the only way to disseminate such information to interested parties. Gimmicks aside, the Internet has changed this -- and research publications need to adapt. If the cut in advertising revenue will really be so painful, a simpler option exists: stop taking public funds.\nThe argument might be made that scholarly journals have reputations established by years of reliability. For sure, the same cannot be said for the Internet. However, if a journal's reputation is worth its subscription fee, will its sales really suffer that greatly? Would this bill really have such dramatic effects, beyond making it easier for interested parties to access scholarly work?\nWe think an act of Congress is appropriate. The same New York Times article quoted above also describes a database created by the National Institutes of Health last year as a suggested repository for medical research articles. However, fewer than four percent of researchers have submitted their materials. Whether this represents a deliberate desire to impede access, or just laziness, is uncertain -- but this goes to show that a governmental intervention may be the only way to produce results.\nIt sounds like black-and-white logic to claim that researchers can either give away their scholarly work or cut themselves off of government funding. But, on a fundamental level, it makes little sense for a taxpayer to have to purchase a subscription to read the fruit of his or her own tax dollars. In our opinion, it does not sound too harsh to say "make the research available or find private funding"