Science Wants to Be Free

Science Wants to Be Free from Technology Review (MIT) "Publicly funded research belongs in the public domain, says Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Along with Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown and Nobel Prize–winning oncologist Harold Varmus, Eisen founded the Public Library of Science, which is launching three new “open access” scientific journals this year. The publishers of paid-subscription journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell aren’t laughing."

Quite a bit of research is funded by our tax dollars. "Big commercial publishers are given content for free and then paid tremendous amounts of money to process and distribute it".

I wonder what other types of research (business, economic, social, etc.) is funded with our tax dollars that we are charged to read when it could be simply placed on the Net. Sure, Google will find it and a blogger will blog about it, which leads to another blogger and then another.