Chronicle
of Higher Education: Late last month, the House of
Representatives' subcommittee on information policy, census,
and National Archives called witnesses to testify on whether
the scientific papers that result from government-funded
research should be freely available—even when they appear
in scientific journals that must charge subscriptions to recoup
their expenses. As the
Chronicle's Jennifer Howard reports, the issue hinges
on weighing the public's interest in gaining access to research
that it has ultimately funded and the publishers' interest in
being compensated for curating the medium through which those
results are presented and preserved.
