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August 05, 2003
Open Access to Medical Research
From this morning's Washington Post, A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research:
[T]he vast majority of the 50,000 to 60,000 research articles published each year as a result of federally funded science ends up in the hands of for-profit publishers -- the largest of them based overseas -- that charge as much as $50 to view the results of a single study online. . . .The Public Library of Science is using a Creative Commons license, although Creative Commons is never mentioned in the article.Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes?
The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.
In its place the organization is constructing a system that would put scientific findings on the Web -- for free.
Posted August 5, 2003 07:43 AM