Paywalls keep the public from seeing publicly funded research.
A huge proportion of scientific research is funded by governments. But a lot of publicly funded research either never gets published, or winds up behind a journal's paywall, so you have to buy a subscription or be affiliated with a university to read it. Now, the UK has announced that all research funded by its main grant-funding bodies must, within six months of being published, be made available "open access," meaning that anyone can read it. A few months ago we wrote about how many federally funded clinical trials in the US are never published at all
, leading to a gap in the publicly available knowledge about drugs. Though accepting federal funding means agreeing to list your paper on the Pub Med database within 12 months of publishing, there are no real rules in the US about when publishing should ...
