Bolstered by Congress?

"Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired by Springer, ScientificAmerican.com has learned.

Open access is the movement, recently bolstered by Congress, to make studies available for free online, instead of charging taxpayers who funded the research (and others) to read them. Many prominent scientists have backed it, signing on with BioMed Central and a non-profit open access publisher, the Public Library of Science". Full article and links at Scientific American.com

The idea that the federal government isn't already involved up to its eyeballs in all scientific research is bogus in itself. The only thing different about "open access" is that at one step--early publication--you should not have to pay to see what you've already paid for. You pay many times over--you fund the researchers (you've probably already paid for their education) at their various institutions through the grants they get from various government agencies, then those institutions skim a huge amount to keep the university running, including the library, which in turn keep those programs going that don't have a cash cow. This in turn eats up a huge amount of time of the faculty, which is why you are paying for your kid to be taught by a grad student from India or China, rather than a full professor, who has to be off in the lab researching and publishing so he can keep his job, which is to hire more foreign nationals to teach your kids. Then you are charged again for that research when it appears in peer-reviewed scientific journals which the library has to buy so the researchers can keep applying for more government grants. A decade ago librarians were all caught up in the idea that the internet was going to be our savior, but sadly have learned otherwise, because business and Congress were just much more clever than we were. This symbiotic relationship, this coziness between research and politics is best illustrated by the shut down of scientific debate on the hoax of human caused climate change--just one example of why science isn't impartial when you let international left wing organizations, Hollywood and Congress control it.