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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.