Mary M. Case, Health information, Chicago Tribune, December 30, 2005. A letter to the editor.
This is regarding your Dec. 19 editorial "To your e-health." The lack of competition in scientific publishing leads to extraordinarily high prices of research journals. The high prices mean that only health-care professionals and researchers affiliated with well-to-do institutions are able to obtain access to the vast array of relevant published research results. The average citizen faces significant barriers. Parents of children with rare genetic diseases who are active and engaged advocates for their children's health find themselves sneaking into research libraries, hiring students in large medical schools to go to the stacks for them or "borrowing" others' IDs and passwords to search electronic databases--all to read the results of research that is funded with their taxpayer dollars.
The National Institutes of Health understands that not only does it have the responsibility of distributing billions of dollars in federal funds to support research, it is incumbent upon it to make sure that the results of that research are widely available to scientists, physicians and the public.
Over decades, publishers have clearly demonstrated that their mission to disseminate information is not as important as their opportunity to make money. Through PubMed Central, the NIH is providing the trusted, integrated database that researchers have demanded and the public deserves. For the parents of sick children, the DC Principles Coalition proposal of linking to publisher Web sites, rather than depositing articles in PubMed Central, is one more version of the run-around. It is time for the publishers to stop protecting their own financial wealth and start focusing on our citizens' health.
(PS: An excellent letter! Also see my 12/19/05 response to the Tribune editorial.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/14/2006 09:41:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
