Featured

Publisher Buys Politicians: Wants to Force Taxpayers to Pay to Read Studies They Financed

January 13, 2012 by admin in Featured, Politics with 0 Comments

Two so-called representatives of the people—Darrell Issa, Republican from California, and Carolyn Maloney, Democrat from New York—are for sale at bargain basement prices. How else can you explain their proposed bill to require taxpayers to pay to view the results of medical research that they’ve already paid for?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) maintains Pub Med Central, an online database of biomedical research containing thousands of articles documenting research paid for by public dollars. It is, of course, freely available to anyone who wants to research it. Pseudo “representatives” Issa and Maloney are co-authoring a bill that would enrich the coffers of already filthy rich medical publishers and the diminish the public’s access to health information that they’ve already funded.

The bill, called The Reseach Works Act, would do two things:

Prohibit the NIH from requiring that studies they’ve financed be submitted to Pub Med Central.
Require that the public pay private publishers fees of $15-35, today’s typical charges, or whatever they can extort, to view the studies.

Medical publishing giant, Elsevier, paid Issa $8,500 and Maloney $2,000 in political donations. That’s a pretty cheap payout for such good returns!

This is an attempt by medical publishers to reverse the NIH’s public access policy that was initiated in 2008. Frankly, it isn’t adequate, as it doesn’t make research freely available to the public until it’s a year old. If Issa and Maloney truly represented the people, their bill would have required free access to all publicly-funded research immediately.

But, apparently they were running a bit short. Could it be that Maloney needed to make a payment for one of her grandkids’ braces? Was Issa having trouble making payments on a mountain chalet for weekend getaways?

Publishing companies claim they need more money to keep the industry going. They claim that they’re providing a public service. What Elsevier fails to reveal is that their profits are up and they pay the researchers nothing, not one cent. They don’t pay the reviewers, either. The profit margins of Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and Informa run 30-35 percent! But this multi-billion dollar industry wants more.

So, they’ve found politicians with needs. Does Issa need new curtains for his office? Is Maloney suffering from not owning the latest Mercedes?

Apparently, the public’s right to freely access the information that they’ve already paid for is less important to these two politicians than whatever they want to spend that money on. Isn’t it sad that politicians can be bought for so little? You’d think that their pride would be worth a bit more than that. But, these are two who seem to enjoy the mud wallow at the bottom of the political morass.

Perhaps Elsevier’s money was just the cost of getting cleaned up for public presentation during the next elections.