Open Access on the Airwaves

Jonathan Eisen points to a story on Marketplace that discusses open-access publishing. (The text is here and audio here.) In it, Janet Babin starts out by speaking with Josh Summer who, after being diagnosed with a chordoma, set out to find out more about his disease. "I'd find an abstract, and I'd click on it. And oh, you have to pay $60 to read this article. Oh, you have to pay $40 to read this article. I mean, I have this disease, I want to know about it," Summer says. She then discusses open-access publishing and the NIH's open-access policy with Duke professor James Boyle and the American Physiological Society's Martin Frank. Boyle says it's only fair for taxpayers to have access to the research they funded while Frank says it may constrain publisher's abilities to recoup their costs.