"Open Access" or Covert Propaganda? (George Soros Alert)

In his book, ''State of Fear,'' author Michael Crichton appended an opinion entitled “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous,” and cautioned against, “a social program masquerading as a scientific one,” citing the widespread eugenics movement in the early part of the last century.

“A second example of politicized science is quite different in character,” warned Crichton. “It exemplifies the hazard of government ideology controlling the work of science, and of uncritical media promoting false concepts.” Just as eugenics drew praise and support from politicians, academicians, and media in its time, so too has the manufactured crisis of global warming today.

This politicizing of science can be found in the way the United States government spends billions to fund various research programs. One example is the $40 billion spent by the U.S. Global Change Research Program since 1990. For that kind of money one would think something conclusive has been ascertained about “global warming,” but if its recent report is any indication, the answer is no.

Another egregious example can be found in the Environmental Protection Agency that, over the past decade, has made grants to more than 2,200 nonprofit groups. An Associated Press article by Rita Beamish in December 2005 noted that those grants often went to groups “that lobby and sometimes sue the agency.”

Multiply this by all manner of government agencies concerned with energy, education, health care and other issues, and by countless advocacy organizations and individuals receiving billions in taxpayer funding.

What emerges is research that often reflects the outcome of whatever cause or theory government bureaucrats are advancing.

Some of this research is published in peer-reviewed scientific and academic journals, and while some good science is achieved, there is no way of knowing how much government-funded research exists to advance various social and political agendas.

Amid these problems, we now have a new piece of legislation called the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S. 2695), which was introduced last May. The bill would mandate that, “federal agencies develop public access policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or from funds administered by that agency.”

The act would further require original research papers that, “have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and result from research supported, in whole or in part, from funding by the federal government” be available to anyone with access to the Internet.

We paid for it, so why shouldn’t We the People have access to it? The problem is that We the People don’t get to decide what gets researched and what doesn’t. Furthermore, We the People rarely have the scientific training and knowledge to grasp the implications of such research. That’s why serious journals, at considerable expense, publish peer-reviewed studies for their peers rather than Joe Sixpack.

Moreover, hardly a day goes by when a headline screams from the pages of some newspaper that some study has concluded that the Earth is doomed or everything you breathe, eat, or drink will kill you. The public has been bombarded for years with bad reporting about bad scientific research, a trend that “open access” would only compound.

This innocent-sounding bill might better be called “The Advancement of Junk Science Act of 2006.”

All the government-funded studies, whether having merit or redolent with hidden agendas, would be available to become a platform by which various social agendas would be advanced.

Nothing truly impedes anyone from access to published research studies; it’s available for those who want to read it. “Open access,” however, is an invitation for more clueless journalism and covert advocacy.

This bill literally forces publishers of medical, scientific, and scholarly journals, which invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in their publications, to give away their work. There is something inherently wrong in that. The Open Access bill is, in this respect, an unconstitutional “taking” of intellectual property by the federal government.

So, what starts out appearing to be a reasonable mandate based on federal funding turns out to be bad news for everyone; from those doing the research to those publishing the research. Ultimately the unskilled consumers of “open access” could also be at risk inasmuch as they are unaware of whether the material they’re reading has any real merit.

Another way to further debase the process that supports questionable science is to create “alternative journals.” It should come as little surprise that liberal financier George Soros, through his Open Society Institute, is a big fan of “open access” and alternative journals.

In 2002, Soros gave $3 million dollars to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, one of whose objectives is to “assist in the establishment of alternative journals that are committed to offering free and unrestricted online access to published articles.” Open access to bogus research could result in the easy dissemination of the social control agenda behind global warming and other “theories.”

A government that commits boneheaded mistakes every day should not be in the business of requiring what research should be openly available while it competes against private research that may well be of far superior merit.

An e-mail, letter, or call to your senator might be a good idea before S. 2695 becomes law.

For very good reasons, medical, scientific, and scholarly journals are intended to be read by those in the communities they serve, not the general public.

This system has worked for a very long time to winnow out ultimately bad or junk science and should be left alone to continue that process.

This looks like a classic baseless hit piece. The author throws George Soros' name in hear just to get people worked up even though George Soros has nothing to do with the proposed law. Then the only argument he makes really argues more for this law being passed than it does for it not being passed if you really think about it. If taxpayors are paying for research, we ought to have access to the findings unless the research was on something like sensitive nuclear weapons technology or something like that we wouldn't want our enemies to have. I agree that the government picks what they'll research and that often their research "reflects the outcome of whatever cause or theory government bureaucrats are advancing." That I don't doubt. But allowing the government to bury research that doesn't reach the "right" conclusions will not help in getting the truth out. We ought to know the results of the research we pay for. The government shouldn't get to pick and choose what they release. That only makes it easier for them to work their spin, if that is in fact what is happening. I really cannot think of any good reason not to make taxpayer funded research available to the public unless there is some vital national security interest in keeping it secret.

"This bill literally forces publishers of medical, scientific, and scholarly journals, which invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in their publications, to give away their work. There is something inherently wrong in that. The Open Access bill is, in this respect, an unconstitutional “taking” of intellectual property by the federal government."

This is bull. They don't have to give away their work. They only have to allow that research that is funded by taxpayers to be published on the Internet. If they don't want to do that, they don't have to take government money. Besides, in most cases these publications do not have anything to do with the research, they just publish what is made available to them by researchers. Looks to me like they are opposed to this law because it hurts their monopoly on publishing scientific research. Their fears are overblown though. Professionals who read these publications will still buy them even if they can get some of the reports free on the Internet, just like lawyers still buy legal research materials even though a lot of it is available free on the Internet. And the average person isn't any more likely to read this stuff if it's published free on the Internet than if he had to buy the publications. Reporters who publish articles on junk science will still buy the publications so they'll have it all, and they wouldn't be any more likely to write junk science stories if the reports are available free on the Internet than they would if these reports were not freely available to the public. And personally, I like being able to refer to the actual research report when I read an article making wild scientific claims so I can judge for myself whether the author is full of it or not.

"... the author might want to work on hiding his leftie-elitist worldview... "

Steve-o: the author is not exactly a leftie elitist. He's actually quite conservative. I guess part of his conservatism includes protecting private property from the government.

Remember, these journals don't receive the federal money, the researchers do. If a scientist writes an article about their federally-funded research project, and if a peer-reviewed journal pays to review and edit and publish and distribute and archive it, why should the journal have to give away the rights to the stuff they paid for?

Suppose you ran a grocery store and some of the produce you spent money to obtain and make available for a price came from farmers receiving federal subsidies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. How would you feel, as a grocer, having to give away the produce you paid to obtain and make available simply because the producer was on the government dole?

Perhaps some of y'all were out sick the day they taught "Free Markets and Keeping Government Out of Them," in Conservatism 101.

I don't really know what to think about this bill. It's not quite what I thought it was from reading the article. As for prohibiting publication in peer reviewed journals of government funded research, I think that would hurt these journals more than anything else because so much of what they publish is government funded. In a way, these journals are recipients of government subsidies, because they get to publish government funded research. Taxpayers fund tens of billions of dollars worth of research every year and these third party journals benefit from publishing that work. Without it, they wouldn't have that much left to publish.

I do like the idea of making research we taxpayers fund freely available to us on the Internet. I don't want to put these journals out of business and I do not believe the law is written in such a way that it will do that. I can see though how these publishers would be upset. They put some effort into these research reports. The scientific community does not charge anything to do peer review, but the journals do have to find people to do the peer review, set it all up, edit, and so on. The researchers do not have to turn in the final drafts, that which is to be published by the journals, but they do have to turn in manuscripts on research that has gone through the peer review process and no doubt had some editing performed by the journals. But, it does come out quite some time after the journal published their final draft. They'll have made what they're going to make on their publications. The news articles covering the research will have already come out. They'll get their credit. Then later regular people will be able to search through the government funded research on the Internet. The knowledge gained from taxpayer funding will be available to those who paid for it, which I think is a good thing.

I am not a scientist and I don't know just a whole lot about how all these publications work, but I see some similarities in some of the publications I have to use in my work. I'm a lawyer, and anything published for lawyers costs an arm and a leg. We pay big bucks for our research materials, and a lot of it really is public information. There was one company, West Publishing, now Thomson West (a Canadian company), that used to basically own most state caselaw and statutes. They published all the law books. They added their own headnotes in the cases which affected the way the books were set up, so they even claimed they owned the page numbers in the cases. When we write a brief, we have to cite the book and page number the cases are found in and when we are talking about a specific passage in a case we have to cite the page number in the case where it can be found. With them owning the page numbers, they had a monopoly, and they charged monopoly prices. When I first started using Westlaw, their online computer database, I think it was priced at something like $9.00 a minute for full access. That cost was passed on to consumers, making legal work more expensive which costs not only individuals who hire lawyers but it adds costs into just about all goods and services available on the market.

Things have changed a lot with respect to law databases. Now you can find most recent cases and statutes at least on the Internet free of charge. The law isn't something only lawyers with a lot of money can access, and that's good because citizens pay for that law because their taxes fund the legislators and the courts. Taxpayers should not have to pay through the nose to access the law. We lawyers still pay for our law books and our online databases. We can't trust some free service to publish everything right away like we need it. We also value the content provided by the publishers that boils the law down for us and saves us time. There are a lot of good products on the market for us now with more competitive pricing than before. Even Westlaw is a lot cheaper. They aren't exactly hurting for money either. They're still the world's largest legal publisher with something like 18,000 products to sell. I have a family member who sells for them and he's not made less than a quarter of a million dollars a year since he started that job. There is still big money to be made in legal publishing.

Overall, I still think that if taxpayers pay for research, it should be available to us. We shouldn't have to pay for some overpriced scientific journal publishing government funded studies. That knowledge we pay for should be available to us all. The Internet is a great medium for this. If we want the actual journals, we can buy them or go to the library and hopefully find them there. It's not as easy as you think to find these things though because few libraries carry a wide selection of them and finding just what information you are looking for is a lot harder without searchable databases that allow you to go right to the relevant section of the text and scan it to see if it is what you are looking for. And it's really a pain if you have to wait weeks for an interlibrary loan just to find that the information you are looking for is not in the publication you requested. What happens in effect is that the little guy, the average taxpayer, doesn't have access to the research his tax dollars helped fund. That's just not right, and it's not a good idea in a society that needs to develop a more knowledge based economy as we ship more and more manufacturing jobs oversees. Taxpayer funded research should be available to us all for the benefit of our society.

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