Is Open Access To Research Biden's Answer To Curing Cancer? - Forbes

" ... If we are indeed on the cusp of a breakthrough in the fight against cancer, Vice President Biden clearly sees sharing as critical component to making forward progress. While he commended researchers on their many accomplishments, from Project GENIE to the ORIEN partnership, he questioned why the work remains so siloed. To really shoot the moon, his remarks repeatedly came back to the need for the field to think more openly ...  Openness isn’t just an argument for the public interest, though perhaps that’s where it starts. Taxpayers in the United States currently fund almost $5 billion in cancer research annually, with an additional $800 million in the President’s Budget for fiscal year 2017 to support cancer research. Right now, the results of that research are overwhelmingly published in closed journals that can cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars to access. When even Harvard can’t keep pace with the rising cost of journal subscriptions, just imagine what that means for everyone else ..."