Why is Science Important? from Alom Shaha on Vimeo.
Check out the dude in the big sweater.
Meanwhile…
Recently, [US] government-sponsored agencies have moved toward open access of scientific findings. That is, the results are published where anyone can see them, and in fact after 12 months the papers must be publicly accessible. Astronomers, for example, almost always post their papers on Astro-ph, a place where journal-accepted papers can be accessed before they are published.
John Conyers (D-MI) apparently has a problem with this. He is pushing a bill through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers, forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big deal, but journals are very expensive. They can cost a fortune: The Astrophysical Journal costs over $2000/year, and they charge scientists to publish in them! So this bill would force scientists to spend money to publish, and force you to spend money to read them.
Ironically, this bill is called The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which is much like the Clean Air Clear Skies Act or the Patriot Act, in that it does exactly the opposite of what its name says. This bill is not fair, it puts a burden on scientists and keeps research from being publicly accessible as it should be. I myself rely on things like Astro-ph to do my reporting here; it could become illegal to post papers there for federally-sponsored scientists if this bill is passed.
You can read more about this at Financial Times, Earlham College, and at Lawrence Lessig’s blog.
– that from badastronomy.com.
Here’s more info in video format:
Wow, as a former astrophysicist with a fair number of papers on astro-ph, I find this horrifying. Services like astro-ph (and there are a number of others) make it fast and easy to distribute published papers and make it easier to find results. This dissemination of knowledge is vital to a healthy scientific community. Just having all that information electronically indexed is a major improvement over the way things were done before. If the US is to stay relevant in basic research, services such as astro-ph have to exist.