Opening Science or Closing It: How to Beat the Odds

“Nobody is yelling at anyone to stop the presses in observing the remarkable fact that Planet3.0 and Watt’s Up With That were allies in the recent internet uprising against the egregious internet-bashing legislation pushed by the entertainment industry in the US Congress... The SOPA legislation had been considered inevitable. Representatives ‘on both sides of the aisle’...had been duly sponsored by Hollywood... Are the internet-threatened Hollywood interests anything like the science-threatened fossil fuel interests? That’s a pretty loose comparison... There are a couple of reasons that their accusations carry weight... These have to do with the self-interests of the scientific community and of the scientific publishing industry... [In] the scientific community...you need to achieve tenure at a top-flight institution...[In the] scientific publishing industry...Public discussion of science on the internet is, like so much else, hampered by unreasonable demands placed by copyright holders... Openness should be at the center of science, and an Open Access movement within the scientific community, recognizing the availability of new distribution mechanisms, is actively promoting dramatic change in this regard. A great step forward was taken by a major funding agency in the US, the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health which requires that all NIH funded publications be made publicly accessible within twelve months after publication. The journal publishers of course are immensely threatened by this Their response?... The instrument is the proposed Research Works Act. Wikipedia’s summary states that ‘The bill contains provisions to prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research and effectively reverts the NIH’s Public Access Policy that allows taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online. If enacted, it would also severely restrict the sharing of scientific data. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform...’”