What if I am a journalist?

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is eager to assist you in writing articles about this developing movement. ATA can supply you with contacts from our diverse membership who'll describe their powerful motivations for joining together to support taxpayer access to biomedical research. For an interview, email the ATA press contact.

While the Internet is certainly affecting how the mainstream media works, there's another area that the anyone's-a-publisher paradigm is affecting: the world of scientific journals.
The place I used to work, the American Chemical Society, just laid off a bunch of people who put its journals together, outsourcing the operation to the company that prints them. (The ACS folks will get to reapply for their jobs.)
The move is indicative of the pressure scientific organizations are feeling as a new generation of scientists enter the lab having grown up in an Internet world...

Tiny computers that constantly monitor ecosystems, buildings and even human bodies could turn science on its head. Declan Butler investigates.
"What are you doing in the lab? Why aren't you out working in the field?" These are not the sorts of question you usually put to your computer. But they should be, according to the proponents of a new type of information technology sometimes known as 'smart dust'....

Political momentum is growing for a change in federal policy that would require government-funded health researchers to make the results of their work freely available on the Internet. Advocates say taxpayers should not have to pay hundreds of dollars for subscriptions to scientific journals to see the results of research they already have paid for. Many journals charge $35 or more just to see one article -- a cost that can snowball as patients seek the latest information about their illnesses.Publishers have successfully fought the "public access" movement for years, saying the approach threatens their subscription base and would undercut their roles as peer reviewers and archivists of scientific knowledge. But the battle lines shifted last month when ...

Few would question the important role that science, technology and innovation have played in building today’s knowledge society. However, “science” in the 21st century is very different from what it was 50 or even 10 years ago. Science is increasingly international and interdisciplinary; it often crosses traditional barriers of institutions, geography, language and culture. State-of-the-art research involves creating and using data sets of unprecedented size and complexity. With the world looking to science to find solutions to global problems, the need to safeguard, evaluate and exchange information and knowledge has never been more pressing.

One indication that you've stirred up a hornet's nest is that your opponents start sending impassioned letters to Congress, hinting that you're an insidious threat to the public welfare.

Over the last year or so, policymakers and legislators have been peppered with mailings instigated by the Assn. of American Publishers, warning of a development that "raises the specter of government censorship and encroachment upon scholarly discourse and academic freedom"...

Excerpt: “It just seems to me like such a conflict of interest with their own mission,” agrees Heather Joseph, executive director of the Washington-based Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an alliance of libraries that supports open access to the scientific literature. “For science to be conducted effectively, open access to data has to be part of the landscape.”

The American Chemical Society has offered an olive branch to the National Institutes of Health in the ongoing dispute over PubChem, the agency’s small-molecule database. The three-part proposal focuses on areas of “common ground” and puts aside the two groups’ philosophical differences. (C&EN is published by ACS.)...

Excerpt: "Rick Johnson, director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said, unlike ACS, NIH researchers are not hiring chemists to pore through patents to extract chemical names and structures. “They’re taking on something that is not any threat to them and they are precluding an activity that will be key to returning on the NIH investment [in the human genome]...new drugs and better health care," he said. “What they want to do is neuter [PubChem] so it’s useless to anyone.” "It's all about protecting the CAS franchise, not about what's best for biomedicine,” Johnson added.

From a stool at Yali’s café, near the University of California campus, Michael Eisen is loudly trashing the big players in academic publishing. Hefty subscription fees for journals are blocking scientific progress, he says, and academics who think they have full access to timely literature are kidding themselves. “They're just wrong,” Dr. Eisen says. He suggests scholarly journals be free and accessible to everyone on the Web...